First Study Shows Apple Vision Pro Speeds Up Surgery by 19%

Apple’s Vision Pro has spent most of its life being called too heavy and too expensive. But a new peer-reviewed study out of UC San Diego suggests that in an operating room, it’s actually neither and can be pretty useful for surgery.

The paper, published in AJO International, looked at using Vision Pro as the main display during endoscopic dacryocystorhinostomy (try saying that 10 times in a row), a tear duct procedure performed through the nose with a scope. Normally the surgeon watches a large monitor parked somewhere in the room. In this study, they wore the headset instead.

The results were solid, as operations ran 19% faster. Every case succeeded with no complications during or after surgery. Surgeons reported a lighter workload, and every single one who took part said they preferred working with the Vision Pro over the monitor setup.

Ergonomics were a big part of that. With a traditional monitor, surgeons often end up craning their neck toward a screen off to the side while their hands work somewhere else entirely. The headset lets them keep a natural forward-facing posture the whole time.

Analyst Horace Dediu, who contributed the space and cost analysis, found that in the context of an operating room the Vision Pro comes in at less than 1% of the cost of conventional visualization systems. It’s also physically smaller than nearly every other piece of equipment in the room, which matters a lot in ophthalmology suites where floor space is limited.

Dediu drew a comparison to the original iPhone when it launched way back in 2007. Originally priced at $500 US it was widely written off as too expensive for the mass market, most famously by Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer who laughed at the debut. It went on to dominate anyway, even at higher prices, because what it did justified what it cost.

A Vision Pro isn’t cheap for a hospital in isolation, but stack it against a surgical monitor cart and suddenly it looks like a rounding error.

Now, this is just one study at one institution, so it’s early days rather than settled science. But it’s among the first to put Vision Pro in the primary display role for this kind of surgery, and the direction it points is interesting for a device still hunting for its killer use case.

Apple’s Vision Pro starts at $4,999 in Canada, but recently saw a price hike to $5,299 CAD, as part of a slate of price increases due to the memory shortage.