As a surgeon at a university hospital in Japan, I began building my own surgical roadmaps on my Mac Pro using OsiriX, which I found by browsing the Apple Web site in 2004. I was looking for ways to use imaging technology to improve surgical procedures, and the combination of OsiriX and the Mac presented interesting possibilities.
We wanted to improve the way we navigate during major surgery. When we perform aggressive surgeries, such as those for pancreatic cancer, we must determine the surgical margin and plan for vascular reconstruction if the cancer has invaded the vascular system. We knew pre-operative volume visualization with OsiriX would help us be more efficient in the operating room.
Now, with the Japanese translation of OsiriX, it is even easier for students and residents to use. We can perform segmentation on our personal Macs anytime. This is important: even at midnight in the outpatient department, we can use OsiriX to create 3D volumes from CT slices.
While OsiriX revolutionized our pre-operative planning, I dreamed of taking that 3D model from the desktop and placing it directly into the surgeon’s view during the actual procedure. In 2016, I founded Holoeyes Inc. to build that bridge.
We developed ‘Holoeyes MD’, software as a medical device (SaMD) cloud service engineered to work seamlessly with OsiriX. It takes polygon data exported from OsiriX and, in under five minutes, converts it into an interactive 3D model. This model can then be displayed holographically in the sterile surgical field via Apple Vision Pro’s Spatial Computing or XR headsets like the Meta Quest.
We named ‘Holoeyes’ in honor of this powerful lineage: OsiriX is named for the Egyptian god Osiris, and Holoeyes for his son, Horus.
Today, OsiriX and Holoeyes function as the ultimate ‘father-son’ tool, an indispensable combination for optimizing the entire surgical journey. I have given presentations in many Japanese institutions explaining these techniques, often followed by requests to speak elsewhere, including the US, Asia, and EU. A number of surgeons have seen the presentation, purchased Macs, downloaded OsiriX, and started using this visualization workflow in their own surgery.