On Apr. 2, 2020, George Washington University Hospital announced it had used Virtual Reality technology to see into COVID-19 patient’s lungs. GW received its first COVID-19-positive patient March 18th. The man, in his late 50s, was transferred from another hospital after his initial symptoms quickly escalated. He was connected to a ventilator at that hospital, but eventually required a more-intensive intervention and died the following week.

“What we’re seeing is that there was rapid and progressive damage to the lungs so that he needed higher levels of support from that ventilator and it got to the point where he needed maximal support from the ventilator,” said Dr. Keith Mortman, Chief of Thoracic Surgery at GW Hospital, in an interview for the hospital’s podcast, GW Hospital HealthCast. “That was when the outside hospital reached out to our expert team here at GW and the patient was transferred to us for something called ECMO, which stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.”

ECMO, which involves removing blood from the body, infusing it with oxygen and returning it to the body, is one of several advanced technologies being used as GW Hospital treats its first patient with COVID-19.