「谷歌眼鏡」進入手術室----中壢英文補習班－金學堂英語的部落格

【聯合報╱By ANAHAD O’CONNOR╱馮克芸譯】

Google Glass Enters The Operating Room

DURHAM, North Carolina — Before scrubbing in , Dr. Selene Parekh, an orthopedic surgeon here at Duke Medical Center, slipped on a pair of sleek, black glasses — Google Glass, the wearable computer with a builtin camera and monitor.

He gave the Internet-connected glasses a voice command to start recording and turned to the motorcycle crash victim on the operating table. He chiseled through bone, repaired a broken metatarsal and drilled a metal plate into the patient’s foot. Dr. Parekh has been using Glass since last year, when Google began selling test versions of its device to thousands of handpicked “explorers” for $1,500. He now uses it to record and archive all of his surgeries at Duke, and soon he will use it to stream live feeds of his operations to hospitals in India as a way to train and educate orthopedic surgeons there.

“In India, foot and ankle surgery is about 40 years behind where we are in the U.S.,” he said. “So to be able to use Glass to broadcast this and have orthopedic surgeons around the world watch and learn from expert surgeons in the U.S. would be tremendous.” A growing number of surgeons are using Google Glass to stream their operations online, float medical images in their field of view, and hold video consultations .

Software developers, too, have created programs that transform the Glass projector into a medical dashboard that displays patient vital signs .

“I’m sure we’re going to use this in medicine,” said Dr. Oliver J. Muensterer, a pediatric surgeon who recently published the first peer-reviewed study on the use of Glass in clinical medicine. “Not the current version, but a version in the future that is specially made for health care with all the privacy, hardware and software issues worked out.” For his study, published in The International Journal of Surgery, Dr. Muensterer wore the device daily for four weeks at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital at Westchester Medical Center in New York. He found that filming rapidly drains the battery and that the camera — which is mounted straight ahead — does not point directly at what he is looking at when he is hunched over a patient with his eyes tilted downward.

He also had to keep the device disconnected from the Internet most of the time to prevent patient data and images from being automatically uploaded to the cloud. “Once it’s on the cloud, you don’t know who has access to it,” Dr. Muensterer said.

Also, the Glass projector can be used to see email and surf the web, potentially allowing doctors to take multitasking to dangerous new levels, said Dr. Peter J. Papadakos at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York.

Similar technology has not always had the smoothest results. Studies have found, for example, that navigational displays can help surgeons find tumors, but they can also induce a form of tunnel vision, or perceptual blindness, that makes them more likely to miss unrelated lesions or problems in surrounding tissue. But Dr. Pierre Theodore, a cardiothoracic surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, calls wearable computers “a game changer.”

“In surgery, Google Glass is incredibly illuminating,” said Dr. Theodore, who uses Glass to float X-rays and CT scans in his field of view at the operating table. “It helps you pinpoint what you’re looking for, so you don’t have to shift your attention away from the operation to look at a monitor somewhere else.”

At Indiana University Health in Indianapolis, Dr. Paul P. Szotek, a trauma surgeon, is developing an app for Glass for use by paramedics. The app streams a live feed from the glasses to the closest emergency rooms, so that doctors can see accident victims at the scene and give paramedics potentially lifesaving instructions .

In January, at a conference in Jaipur, India, Dr. Parekh performed surgery and used Glass to stream the procedure on his personal website. That day, the site drew in so many visitors from India and elsewhere that it crashed. “I’ve been even more excited about Google Glass since then,” he said.

中譯

在美國北卡羅來納州杜倫市的杜克大學醫學中心，骨外科醫師普拉克洗手進入手術室之前，戴上一副時髦的黑眼鏡──內建攝影機及螢幕的穿戴式電腦「谷歌眼鏡」。

他給這副連上網路的眼鏡下了聲控指令，讓它開始錄影，然後轉向手術檯上的機車車禍傷患。他鑿穿骨頭，修補一塊碎裂的蹠骨，並把金屬板放進他腳內。

谷歌去年以每副1500美元把這款眼鏡的測試版賣給精心挑選的數千名「探索者」，普拉克醫師也一路用到現在。目前他在杜克完成的所有手術都以谷歌眼鏡記錄及存檔，不久後還將用它把手術過程以現場串流方式傳給印度一些醫院，訓練並教育當地的骨外科醫師。

他說：「印度足與踝手術大約落後我們美國40年，因此，能夠以谷歌眼鏡轉播手術，讓全球骨外科醫師觀摩美國專科醫師動手術並從中學習，是件了不起的事。」

現在愈來愈多外科醫師使用谷歌眼鏡，把他們的手術經過串流上網、提出他們視野下的醫學影像，並舉行影音會診。

軟體開發商也推出一些程式，把谷歌眼鏡投影器變成病患生命徵象的顯示板。

兒童外科醫師曼斯特爾最近針對谷歌眼鏡在臨床醫學上的使用，發表了第一篇同儕審查的研究報告，他說：「我確信我們醫界會使用谷歌眼鏡。不是目前這種版本，而是專為醫療設計，妥善解決了所有隱私及軟硬體問題的未來版。」

曼斯特爾為了這篇發表在《國際外科學雜誌》上的研究報告，在紐約州威徹斯特醫學中心的瑪麗亞法拉利兒童醫院，一連四周每天戴用谷歌眼鏡。他發現，錄影功能會迅速耗盡電池電力，而在他彎下腰來垂視病患時，裝在眼鏡正前方的鏡頭並未瞄準他觀看的東西。

曼斯特爾還必須讓谷歌眼鏡泰半時間不與網路聯結，以免病患資料及畫面自動上傳到雲端。他說：「一旦上了雲端，你不知道誰能接觸到那些資料。」

此外，紐約羅徹斯特大學醫學中心的帕帕達科斯醫師說，谷歌眼鏡的投影器可以用來看電郵及瀏覽網路，這可能讓醫師把多工型態發展到前所未見的危險程度。

類似科技的結果，並非總能盡如人意。例如，多項研究發現，導航螢幕可協助醫師找到腫瘤，但也會導致隧道視野或視而不見情況，使得醫師更可能錯失周邊組織中不相關的病變或問題。