The Apple Vision Pro, announced over three years ago and now priced at nearly 4,000 euros, has found an unexpected niche in surgical settings after failing to gain traction with consumers.
At the First European Spatial Computing Healthcare Summit in Leipzig, pioneering surgical applications ran exclusively on the Vision Pro. Ronny Grunert, an engineer at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology, developed navigation software with Dirk Winkler from University Hospital Leipzig that projects high-resolution MRI and CT data as three-dimensional maps directly into surgeons' field of view. Grunert emailed Apple CEO Tim Cook about the project in October 2023.
David S. Baskin of Methodist Hospital in Houston, who has performed more than 5,000 endonasal procedures, called the headset indispensable after just two operations. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego found that surgeons using the Vision Pro completed 32 endoscopic procedures on blocked tear ducts in an average of 34.4 minutes, compared with 42.7 minutes using conventional monitors — a nearly 19 percent reduction in treatment time with no complications.