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Dr. Pedro del Nido, chief of cardiac surgery at Children’s Hospital improves surgical techniques on children born with heart defects.

The 55-year-old Chilean-born surgeon and his team of researchers develop cutting-edge ways to make pediatric cardiac operations safer and more effective.

And one of the tools he is using comes from the world of video gaming.

While researching a 3D ultrasound imaging system on a $10 million National Institutes of Health grant, del Nido noticed one big flaw - that the images lacked a sense of depth. So he and his team, which includes Ph.D.s in computer science and engineering, decided to borrow a technique used by developers of 3D games to create stereoscopic glasses to generate realistic-looking holograms of a live heart.

Computer graphic card maker NVidia heard about the work and contacted del Nido, offering equipment and engineering support.

Working together, they altered the ultrasound equipment to churn out images of the heart at 70 frames per second and routing them through “shutter glasses” a surgeon can wear while performing heart surgery.

Children’s Hospital colleague Dr. Nikolay Vasilyev, a Russian native, whom del Nido recruited from the Cleveland Clinic five years ago, has successfully tested the new procedure by closing heart defects on Yorkshire pigs 44 percent faster with the shutter glasses.

When it comes to his research abilities, Vasilyev describes del Nido as precise, calm and thoughtful.

Del Nido is hoping that FDA approval of the stereoscopic technique is only a year or two away so that clinical trials can begin at Children’s.

Del Nido oversees a staff of six surgeons and five surgical fellows at Children’s, which has the country’s largest pediatric cardiac surgery practice, completing some 1,300 procedures a year. In addition to the 250 surgeries he performs annually, del Nido also teaches at Harvard Medical School.

But del Nido has another important role - that of medical ambassador for pediatric cardiac surgery - where he’s known around the world for his surgical prowess. He just completed a trip to India and has provided surgical demonstrations all over Europe and Asia.

But he maintains especially strong ties with his Latino heritage by making frequent medical missions to Latin and South American medical centers, where he works with local doctors to improve cardiac surgical procedures in his native Chile, as well as Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala and Equador.

Source: BostonHerald.com

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