Emerging neurotech and medical uses for AR

Dr. Christoph Leuze is director of the Visualization Core at the Stanford Wu Tsai Institute where his research focuses on virtual and augmented reality technologies for medical applications, and founder of Nakamir, a startup creating training and guidance solutions for the factory of the future leveraging Augmented Reality. He taught the first Stanford course on medical mixed reality development and founded the Stanford Medical Mixed Reality program, an institute-wide initiative to bring together academia, clinic and industry to establish and improve mixed reality applications for patient care. 

Dr. Leuze has received multiple prizes for his work in Augmented Reality including the IEEE VR People’s choice award for the best AR demo, the TechConnect Award for one of the most promising technological innovations for national security and the prize for the best 3D video at the Ars Electronica Art and Science Festival. Dr. Leuze has studied at Leipzig and Chiba University and received the Otto Hahn medal of the Max Planck Society for his PhD thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig.

In this talk I will provide an overview of mixed reality applications in medicine and industry. Depending on the user and the application, mixed reality applications have very different requirements for hardware and software. 

Surgeons require highly accurate guidance, students an entertaining and educating experience and factory workers a quick way to lookup complicated procedures. I will detail a few of our use cases and explain our choices for mixed reality hardware and software for the different scenarios.

Dr. Anqi Zhang is currently an American Heart Association (AHA) postdoctoral fellow working with Professor Zhenan Bao in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Professor Karl Deisseroth in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Professor Charles M. Lieber in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University in 2020, and her B.S. degree in Materials Chemistry from Fudan University in 2014. She is interested in combining novel chemical, genetic, and electronic tools to monitor and interrogate neural circuits in a minimally invasive manner.

Implantable neuroelectronic interfaces have enabled advances in both fundamental research and treatment of neurological diseases but traditional intracranial depth electrodes require invasive surgery to place and can disrupt neural networks during implantation. I developed an ultrasmall and flexible endovascular neural probe that can be implanted into sub-100-micrometer–scale blood vessels in the brains of rodents without damaging the brain or vasculature. In vivo electrophysiology recording of local field potentials and single-unit spikes have been selectively achieved in the cortex and olfactory bulb. Histology analysis of the tissue interface showed minimal immune response and long-term stability. This platform technology can be readily extended as both research tools and medical devices for the detection and intervention of neurological diseases.