With 5G-enabled hospitals for veterans, a better future of healthcare is on the horizon.

The VHA is deploying advanced, 5G-enabled clinical care systems at the VAPAHCS with a goal to deliver unprecedented improvements in care to our nation’s veterans, as well as being a leader in the Fourth Industrial Revolution in healthcare powered by 5G.

Known as Project Convergence, the initiative brings Verizon’s 5G technology, Medivis’ 3D holographic clinical visualization system and Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 headset with Microsoft Azure together in an effort to reduce costs and improve the quality and safety of surgical care for our nation’s veterans. Together, they’re delivering a 5G-enabled, AR surgical navigation system.

Today at the VAPAHCS, 5G-enabled, holographic, AR-assisted surgery seeks to leverage the speed and low latency of Verizon 5G, Medivis’ Surgical AR platform and Microsoft’s HoloLens head-mounted display to deliver breakthrough advances in the quality, safety and cost of care. In the future, Azure cloud store and compute could provide global availability of high-resolution images from its cloud Picture Archive and Communication System (PACS). When combined with Verizon’s mobile edge computing (MEC), the VHA could accelerate the era of AR-assisted surgery.

The goal? To advance surgical visualization by transforming traditional 2D imaging data into near real-time 3D holographic visualizations, giving doctors the ability to visualize a patient’s anatomy to enhance surgical practices and the precision of care they provide.

With this technology, “a surgeon could have a 3D image superimposed upon a patient so they can see into that patient before they start cutting and have electronic health data displayed on the headset at the same time,” according to a Nextgov article.¹

Why is 5G important to veterans?

Dr. Osamah Choudhry, neurosurgeon and co-creator of Medivis, agrees. “Successfully treating cancer remains one of the most enormous challenges facing us today,” he said. “By taking a two-dimensional patient image, whether that’s an MRI or a CAT scan, and converting it to 3D holographic renderings of that same patient, we could better enable surgeons to dissect around and remove the cancer. Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband should allow us to deliver this data to surgeons

with, for all intents and purposes, no lag time. And every single millisecond counts because there is basically no room for error or delay.”²

Microsoft VP and Chief Medical Officer Dr. David Rhew added, “In the same way GPS provides the right information at just the right time so drivers can maneuver while keeping their hands on the wheel, digital health technology can enable real-time guidance for clinicians while they perform operations and procedures. The VA, Microsoft, Verizon and Medivis are seeking to transform this vision into reality by combining state-of-the-art mixed-reality technology, cloud computing and AI, all on a 5G network.”