Google Glass As Medical Device: OU Medical Student's Innovative Use Of New Technology In Surgery

Florence Doo, a second-year medical student at Oakland University, listens to Jeffrey Fischgrund, M.D., during a spinal surgery at Beaumont Hospital. Both are wearing Google Glasses as a demonstration of how surgeons may be able to operate in the future without having to look away from a patient to see vitals and other information on video screens. Doo has formed a company to make the Google Glass device.

Florence Doo, a second-year medical student at Oakland University, has her hands full.

Not with school, although that certainly keeps her busy, but with starting and growing a medical device company that plans to use Google Glass to deliver heads-up displays to surgeons.

The benefit? Surgeons don't have to take their eyes off their patients during procedures to look around at video screens scattered around the operating room displaying the information they need.

Surgeons can pull up important images such as CAT scans — and even transmit images of the operation in progress for teaching purposes — all while keeping their eyes on the task at hand.

The big idea

Doo's company is called FoveOR LLC — "fove" coming from the word "fovea," a specialized part of the eye for high-acuity vision. "OR" is the abbreviation for operating room.

Doo has the avid support of leading surgeons at Royal Oak-based Beaumont Health Systemand is getting support services from OU Inc., Oakland's on-campus tech incubator.

She's also in the final stages of negotiating the designing and building of a working prototype and has funding sources lining up to invest as she needs capital.

Despite her status as a student at OU, Doo is even taking part in weekly classes that provide practical advice and mentoring to would-be entrepreneurs. The classes are put on in Ann Arbor by David Brophy, director of the Center for Venture Capital and Private Equity at the University of Michigan's Stephen M. Ross School of Business.

The scope of the device's capability is broad. Surgeons would be able to access CAT scans, MRIs and X-rays that were taken previously and look at current X-ray or camera-generated images of an operation in progress, including computer-assisted navigation.

Supporters say it's invaluable for teaching hospitals to be able to show, through the Internet, images of an operation in progress to students anywhere. Currently, those images are available on various screens throughout the operating room, forcing surgeons to continually focus their attention away from the patient.

Doo, who turned 25 this month, first drew attention for her idea of keeping surgeons focused on patients last May when she finished second in a Google Glass Challenge put on by MedTech Boston, an innovation network.

She was one of 12 finalists and the only medical student, winning a consultation with White House Innovations Fellow Nayan Jain.

The other finalists and most of the 50 who entered the challenge were M.D.s.

After being told she was one of the Google Glass Challenge finalists, Doo started approaching OU professors to vet her idea.




"It seemed like it would be valuable and someone was needed to get this done," said Doo, who has filed one provisional patent on her idea. "I asked myself, 'Am I the right person?' I said: 'You know what? You might as well try it.' "


Testing the market



Doctors and nurses focus on a single patient during surgery — but they also monitor TV screens scattered about the operating room.
Based on her success at the Glass Challenge, Doo was asked to go to New York City this month to meet with one angel investor. She said she had feelers from a West Coast tech network asking her whether she would be willing to move to California if funding were available.

Doo said "no." Though not long a resident of Michigan, she wants to grow the company here as a joint effort with her Beaumont supporters.

"I want to keep it at Beaumont," Doo said moments after observing a spinal surgery in the operating room at the behest of Jeffrey Fischgrund, M.D., one of her mentors, Beaumont's chief of orthopedic surgery and chairman of the department of orthopedic surgery at OU's William Beaumont School of Medicine.

A reporter and a photographer had been invited into the O.R. to watch the surgery, too, to see how the handful of doctors and nurses used the various TV screens scattered about and to get a feel for how Google Glass would be of value during surgery.

"You heard what she just said. She wants to keep it at Beaumont. We'll keep it here," Fischgrund said.

"I have funds available to me. There's philanthropy and other sources of money we can tap into. It's a priority to get this funded, let's put it that way."

"Obviously, Flo's pretty dynamic. She has the drive," Fischgrund said a few days before the spinal surgery.

"When I heard about her idea, I called her up and had her in the operating room within 48 hours. Not having to lift your head up from the patient takes you to the next level of confidence."

Word spread quickly among department chairs at Beaumont about what Doo had in mind, Fischgrund said. "We all started outbidding each other — 'No, I want her to work with me.' " he said.

Another of her mentors is Steven Almany, a cardiologist at Beaumont and an associate professor at the OU medical school. He is also one of the managing directors of Petoskey venture capital firm BioStar Ventures LLC.

"Florence came to me and asked me if her idea was something of value," Almany said. "She gave me a road map of what this would look like.

"There's a long way to go, obviously, but this is the kind of thing that will be the future of medicine."

Tapping the experts

UM's Brophy is a director of BioStar Ventures. When Almany told him what Doo was up to, Brophy said, he suggested she apply for his weekly practicum, which meets for three hours each Wednesday. About 50 would-be entrepreneurs applied for the current class and 15 were accepted, including Doo.

"She's smart and she's an innovator," Brophy said. "She built a $10,000 device for $250 when she was at Boston University.

"Her head is in the right place. She's already dealing with intellectual property and negotiating contracts, and the space she wants to be in is quite exciting."

The $250 device was a reference to a device Doo cobbled together during graduate school at BU to track the eye movements of video game players for a neuroscience class. She used open-source software, two Web cameras and a pair of lab goggles for her head-mounted eye tracker.

The actual cost was $178, she said.

"I discovered I could build things," Doo said. "But it caused a crisis. I thought maybe I should go into engineering instead of medical school."

But the crisis passed for Doo, a native of Huntington Beach, Calif., who got her undergraduate degree in neuroscience in 2010 at Wellesley College outside Boston and her master's in medical sciences from BU in 2012.

Beaumont's Almany said it was too early to start negotiating terms for an investment in FoveOR by BioStar, which is raising its third and largest fund. Almany couldn't disclose details because of restrictions by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission but is targeting between $100 million and $200 million, according to The Wall Street Journal.

"I'm just mentoring her for now," Almany said. "If we had started negotiating terms this early, it would have been taking advantage of her. We'll see how things develop, but certainly funding her at some point is an option."

What needs to be developed now is a working prototype.

Through Amy Butler, OU Inc.'s executive, Doo was introduced to Christie Coplen, president of Royal Oak-based Versicor LLC, a maker of electronic control units for medical device manufacturers that also provides consulting, engineering services and prototyping for startups.

Coplen is helping FoveOR with its prototype plans. Versicor, she said, also will help Doo pitch to potential investors.

"A minimally viable product will involve some hardware interface with Google Glass and software to pull data down from the hospital, manipulate it into the cloud and then pull it back down into Glass," she said.

Surgeons would be able to operate the system and change images on the heads-up display with verbal commands.

While Google Glass is where Doo is starting, she said it will be important to have FoveOR's technology work with head-up displays besides Google's — such as that developed by Oculus, a maker of virtual reality headsets now on the market; Epson, which markets Moverio smart glasses; and Avegant Corp., an Ann Arbor-based maker of 3-D headsets that raised a $4 million round of venture capital in June. Avegant's headsets are meant for video gamers as well as for watching any video source on mobile devices, including streaming video.

Said Doo: "We're starting with Google Glass, but we've got to be device-agnostic. We can't just focus on Google."

Source