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Siemens Healthineers has recently introduced a new app for Apple Vision Pro, aimed at users including surgeons, medical students, and patients. This app allows them to view immersive, interactive holograms of the human body generated from medical scans within their real-world environment. The visualization provided by the app could aid in surgical planning, medical education, and helping patients understand procedures. The Cinematic Reality app is now accessible on the Apple App Store and has been showcased at the Siemens Healthineers booth during the HIMSS trade show in Orlando, Florida, from March 12 to 14.

“Cinematic Reality gives people the opportunity to immerse themselves in a world of photorealistic renderings of the human anatomy. Apple Vision Pro perfectly presents that three-dimensional experience, combined with great flexibility and standalone use. We see great potential for the technology for clinical as well as educational purposes,” said Christian Zapf, head of Digital and Automation at Siemens Healthineers.

Apple Vision Pro, the company’s initial spatial computer, seamlessly integrates digital content with the user’s physical surroundings. Users can interact with apps using intuitive gestures such as looking, tapping, flicking, or using virtual input methods like a keyboard or dictation. With the Cinematic Reality app on Apple Vision Pro, users can zoom in on clinical images, enlarge content, rotate around a rendering of the human body, and access basic two-dimensional reading tools such as scrolling, all without needing to connect to an additional computer.

The Cinematic Reality app leverages the power of Apple Silicon and Metal, paving the way for future development. It offers a more realistic means of visualizing organs or body parts, enhancing communication with patients, discussing clinical cases, and educating medical students. In the future, this technology could assist surgeons in pre-operative planning, facilitate interdisciplinary communication, and improve understanding of scans and medical conditions among non-radiologists and patients.

“We have further optimized our existing algorithm of Cinematic Reality to allow computationally intense methods to run on Apple Vision Pro’s M2 processor”, said Sebastian Krueger, lead developer Cinematic Reality at Siemens Healthineers. “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.”

Please note that Cinematic Reality for Apple Vision Pro is currently in prototype stage and under development, with future availability not guaranteed.

© Siemens Healthineers AG