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At Sunnybrook hospital in Toronto, Canada, surgeons are beginning to utilize the latest in video games to aid in surgical operations, simulating what GPS tracking devices do for cars. Using the technology behind the wildly popular Kinect gaming system, surgeons use their fingers to flick through medical images.

“What this was able to do is take away that last barrier and remove the mouse, remove the interface . . . and now I just give it hand signs,” Dr. Calvin Law, a surgical oncologist, told the Toronto Star. “We’re able to control the computer without actually touching anything.”

During surgery, doctors can navigate the patient’s body using the “GPS” system the engineers had developed. A major benefit of the system is that the surgeons do not have to touch an actual computer in order to flip through the medical images. In the past, when surgeons would touch computers, they would then have to scrub down before operating on the patient again.

Not any more, thanks to this incredible new development in medical imagery.

As a first-year surgical resident at the University of Toronto, Matt Strickland, also an electrical engineer, was that assistant. “He’d often be the guy that goes back 20 frames, forward a frame,” says Jamie Tremaine, a mechatronics engineer.

Jamie Tremaine, a mechatronics engineer, and Matt Strickland, a first-year surgical resident at the University of Toronto, developed the Kinect pseudo-GPS system after a series of conversations about using the Microsoft Kinect to aid with surgical modeling.

Article Written by Greg Minton