Apple Vision Pro is a bargain, say surgeons

A new study covering wearing an Apple Vision Pro during certain surgeries has concluded that it is superior to existing medical equipment, and is very much worth the relatively small cost.

Apple Vision Pro has been used for surgery since it first came out, and surgeons have already said that it is so light it saves them pain and injury. Now a study conducted at the UC San Diego Shiley Eye Institute, has directly compared using Apple Vision Pro to what it calls “traditional monitor-based” surgery.

The resulting paper, called “Apple Vision Pro as a Wearable Display for Endoscopic Dacryocystorhinostomy: Surgical Experience, Efficiency, and Cost,” claims to be among the first to evaluate the device for endoscopic lacrimal surgery. The researchers considered factors including efficiency, reliability, weight and cost, and concluded that Apple Vision Pro:

• Means 19% shorter operating times
• Had 100% functional success with no complications
• Reduced surgeon workload
• Improved ergonomics

In the full paper, the researchers note that they performed 32 “consecutive endoscopic DCR procedures… 16 with the AVP and 16 size-matched controls.” For each surgery, there were two primary surgeons and they were assisted by three attending surgeons.

Significantly, the results showed “every participating surgeon preferring the Apple Vision Pro experience.” Both operating and assisting surgeons wore the Apple Vision Pro during the procedures with the device, where in the control operations they used one 32-inch 4K monitor at the top of the operating table.

“To view the monitor, both surgeons had to rotate their upper bodies approximately 90 degrees away from their forward-facing posture,” says the paper. With the Apple Vision Pro, the two surgeons both had “an immersive, spatially-anchored image… eliminating the need for monitor sharing or body rotation.”

Cost and weight

Writing about the research for investment research firm Asymco, one of the researchers described the cost and space impacts of the headset in the “constrained environments of ophthalmology operating rooms.”

“In my experience, the Apple Vision is criticized for two things: being too big/heavy and being too expensive,” he or she wrote. But it is “notable for being very small and very cheap… it is less than 1% of the cost and smaller than almost any piece of equipment.”

They don’t dismiss the fact that cost of the Apple Vision Pro is significant even for a hospital. Nonetheless, the paper “considered what it can do, and, for that, it’s a bargain.”

Apple Vision Pro originally cost from $3,499. Due to the global shortage of processors and memory, it recently rose to a starting price of $3,699.