Stanford University Medical Center's Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery has started using Google Glass in its resident training program. Stanford will use software from Glass app maker CrowdOptic to help train residents on performing cardiothoracic surgery.

While a resident is operating on a patient, surgeons can use the CrowdOptic software to watch the resident's progress and send visual feedback to the resident on technique. Before using Google Glass, the company explains, because views are restricted, it was difficult for surgeons to fully understand how the procedure was going from the resident's perspective.

This is CrowdOptic's second major partnership with a hospital.

In June, CrowdOptic partnered with the University of California San Francisco, to test how the software could help faculty in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. During the trial period, surgeons at UCSF used the app to communicate with remote physicians and also train residents. The broadcasts of these surgeries were sent to remote and local televisions so that any number of hospital faculty members could watch.

"We see strong potential for technology to enhance the training of physicians who will benefit from live perspectives of views that have been to date restricted by the realities of modern day orthopedic surgery," UCSF Chair of Orthopaedic Surgery Dr. Thomas Vail said in a statement at the time. "These include physicians developing new clinical procedures and techniques to more fundamental training principles such as understanding the 3-dimensionality of anatomy required in modern orthopedics."

CrowdOptic was also included in a list of five Glass Certified Partners that Google announced earlier this summer. Two other healthcare-related startups on the list included Augmedix, which developed a clinical documentation offering for physicians, and Wearable Intelligence, which offers hospital faculty a series of workflow systems to help make communication and file transfers more efficient.