Ultrasound-guided vascular access offers well-established advantages over landmark-based techniques: lower first-attempt failure rates, faster time to success, and fewer complications. It is hence globally the gold standard. Yet a persistent ergonomic problem undermines its full potential. The procedure site and the visual display are spatially discrepant, forcing clinicians to divide attention between patient and screen.

The program investigates whether mixed reality and augmented reality head-mounted displays can eliminate this disconnect by unifying the ultrasound image within the operator's direct field of view. We are examining performance, safety, teaching efficiency, remote supervision, and workspace ergonomics across simulation and clinical settings.

Our initial work focused on passthrough augmented reality via Apple Vision Pro — a binocular, wireless, standalone device offering state-of-the-art video see-through capabilities. Unlike monocular or optical see-through HMDs, this approach avoids image degradation from real-world lighting conditions and resolution limitations.

Our published study was conducted at an international ECMO symposium, recruiting vascular access experts including anesthesiologists, intensivists, and cardiac surgeons. A second study has been submitted for publication.

Extracorporeal Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (ECPR) is a high-acuity, time-critical procedure performed under extreme cognitive load. Accurate contemporaneous documentation is nearly impossible during active cannulation, yet the resulting procedural record is essential for clinical governance, handover, and outcome analysis.

Situational awareness is a broader challenge than it first appears. Team members already present become task-focused and are at risk of losing the bigger picture: what has happened, in what sequence, how long has elapsed, and what decisions have already been made.

Sessions addresses this across multiple levels simultaneously. By automating timestamp capture and streaming a continuously updated scenario summary to a large display in the resus bay, it removes documentation burden from the team and maintains a shared situational reference for everyone present.

Looking further ahead, integrating real-time outcome prediction scores introduces the ability to support patient selection decisions during active ECPR. The platform is currently deployed in our simulation program, with a pathway to clinical implementation under development.

Conventional wine decanting serves two purposes: aerating the wine to develop aroma and soften tannins, and separating it from sediment. What it does not do — and cannot do — is address lead contamination leached from the decanter itself.

Lead crystal decanters, long favored for their optical properties, release measurable quantities of lead into wine during storage and even brief contact. This has been documented since the early 1990s: Graziano & Blum (1991) demonstrated significant lead transfer from lead crystal into port wine within hours.

The VinOx hypothesis is straightforward: passing wine through an ECMO hollow-fiber oxygenator circuit simultaneously aerates the wine — achieving in minutes what conventional decanting requires hours to accomplish — while routing it through a lead-free medical-grade membrane system. Whether the membrane might also exert a filtration effect on dissolved lead already present in the wine is an intriguing secondary question.