Fox 2 Now reported that doctors at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami used a set of Google Cardboard glasses, a virtual reality product that retails for less than $20 online, to map out the surgery for little Teegan Lexcen, who was born in August has helped save the life of a baby who was so sick that doctors told her parents to take her home to die.
Google Cardboard looks like a set of big square goggles. Stick your iPhone inside and with the right app, you can see images in three-dimensional virtual reality.
Doctors at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami used the device to map out an operation they say they couldn’t have envisioned otherwise.
On Wednesday, four weeks after her surgery, baby Teegan was taken off a ventilator and is breathing on her own. Doctors expect her to go home within the next two weeks and make a full recovery.
“It was mind-blowing,” says Cassidy Lexcen, the baby’s mother. “To see this little cardboard box and a phone, and to think this is what saved our daughter’s life.”
Here’s how it was done:
Three times a week, 30 cardiac doctors and nurses sit in a room at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital and discuss the treatment road maps for their patients and for children who might become their patients.
“The arc of people’s lives get determined in these conferences,” Burke said.
On December 10, 4-month-old Teegan lay on an operating table in Miami.
The first challenge was how to get to her heart. Normally, the heart is in the center of the chest, and to access it doctors make what’s called a midline incision, cutting from the top to the bottom of the breastbone.
But Teegan’s heart wasn’t normal. It was far to the left side of her chest. Before using Google cardboard, Burke feared he would have to make what’s called a clamshell incision, which is a midline incision plus another cut going from the center of her chest all the way to the left side.
“It’s massive trauma to a baby — it’s just horrendous,” Burke said.
He was worried Teegan wouldn’t survive it. “She was dwindling away. She’d been slowly dying for three months,” he said.
That’s where Google Cardboard proved advantageous over 3-D printing. The printer would have given Burke just her heart but to access her heart surgically, he needed to be able to visualize it in context with her ribcage and other structures.
With the use of the virtual image, Burke figured out a way to do just the normal midline incision and spare her the dreaded clamshell cut.
Once he was inside her chest, he says Google Cardboard helped him out again.
A normal heart has two ventricles. The right one supplies blood to the lungs, and the left one supplies blood to the rest of the body.
But Teegan has only a right ventricle. It had been doing the work of both, but it couldn’t do it for much longer. “The right ventricle is the wimpier, weaker ventricle, and if ventricles could talk, it would say ‘I can’t do this. I’m not designed for this job,’ ” Burke said.
The usual surgeries on children with only one ventricle wouldn’t work on Teegan because of her unique defects and anatomy. Using the virtual image, Burke invented a new surgery, shoring up and rerouting her one ventricle so it could do the work of both ventricles long term.
Figuring all this out was something he had to do before he actually opened her up — every minute wasted in the operating room trying to map out a plan puts a baby at higher risk for heart and brain damage.
The night before Teegan’s surgery, Burke lay in bed imagining her heart based on the Google Cardboard image, mapping out the precise steps he would take in the operating room.
When he opened her up the next day, her heart was exactly the same as the image. He proceeded with no surprises. “Sometimes that’s what makes the difference between life and death,” he said.
On Wednesday, four weeks after her surgery, Teegan was taken off a ventilator and is breathing on her own. Doctors expect her to go home within the next two weeks and make a full recovery.
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