Invisible Man, eat your heart out. In a first, scientists have just found a way for surgeons to see through blood during a procedure, effectively making it transparent.
On Tuesday, Ocutrx Technologies revealed the innovative tool, named HemoLucence. It reportedly uses AI-powered physics to digitally visualize blood as though it were translucent, which should give surgeons a clear view of the tissue beneath while operating. The technology is part of a surgical microscope system that the company plans to test in clinical trials as early as this year.
“Having the ability to render blood ‘transparent’ now makes the unseen, in the heat of surgical battle, seen, creating another layer of safety and confidence for surgeons that traditional visual aids can’t provide,” said Leonel Hunt, medical advisor at Ocutrx and an attending surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Spine Center and Cedars-Sinai Orthopedic Center in Los Angeles, in a statement from the company.
Researchers at Ocutrx’s R&D division, Genius Labs, developed HemoLucence. It’s intended to “overcome blood opacity through advanced computational physics.” The researchers use this physics to understand how light behaves when it passes through areas filled with blood. With the information collected from images of the surgical site at different angles, algorithms then reconstruct in real time what these areas should look like underneath the blood, without surgeons needing to worry about sucking up or flushing out the blood. In tests so far, HemoLucence has been able to visualize areas covered by roughly a quarter inch of human blood, though the company expects the tech will soon reach up to a half inch of blood.
“The ability to render blood as transparent will provide a level of visualization not previously possible in any field of surgery. No matter the discipline or scale, bleeding is a regular part of any surgery and can create several challenges,” said Robert Louis, a neurosurgeon and director of the Skull Base and Pituitary Tumor Program at Hoag Memorial Hospital in California, in a statement from the company. “This breakthrough helps overcome those challenges and is a significant step forward in making surgery safer and more efficient.”
The company debuted HemoLucence this week at Abu Dhabi Global Health Week 2025. And a brief video of how it works can be seen here. But it will still take some time before you can expect to see it in a real-world operating room. The tech is a feature of the company’s OR-Bot 3D Surgical Microscope System, and clinical trials of the microscope are scheduled to begin either this year or next.
It’s not quite Superman’s X-ray vision, but it’s still pretty impressive for us mere mortals.
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