Surgeons, medical students, and patients will soon have holographic anatomical displays at their fingertips with Siemens Healthineers’ new Cinematic Reality App for Apple Vision Pro, allowing them to plan out and better understand surgical procedures.

Apple Vision Pro is Siemens Healthineers’ first spatial computer, which uses augmented and virtual reality technologies to integrate digital information with the physical world. With it, users can interact with 3D displays using intuitive gestures such as tapping their fingers to select options, flicking their wrists to scroll, or using a virtual keyboard or dictation to type.

The app displays virtual holograms of a patient’s body created from medical images captured in real-world environments. It is meant to be a more realistic way for visualizing organs or body parts to explain clinical cases to patients, discuss clinical questions around referrals, or educate medical students. Sebastian Krueger, lead developer of Cinematic Reality at Siemens Healthineers, says that it may assist surgeons in the future with preoperative planning, help non-radiologists and patients understand scans and conditions, and establish interdisciplinary communication between different specialists.
“We have further optimized our existing algorithm of Cinematic Reality to allow computationally intense methods to run on Apple Vision Pro’s M2 processor. The rendering technique is used to simulate the way light interacts with objects in a virtual environment, producing highly realistic lighting and reflections in the resulting images,” he said in a statement.

On Apple Vision Pro, the app enables users to zoom into details on clinical images, enlarge content, and rotate around virtual renderings. It also comes with 2D reading tools such as scrolling and can visualize clinical cases directly through the native app without connecting to an additional computer.
Siemens Healthineers will be showing the app at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference from March 12-14 in Orlando, Florida.

The Cinematic Reality App is now available on the Apple App Store but is still a prototype under development and not commercially available. Its future availability cannot be guaranteed at this time.

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