Augmented reality: 3D image-guided surgery

Background Over the last three decades, surgical practice has undergone a significant change with a move towards minimally invasive surgery (MIS) as the standard of care [1]. Although this has brought with it significant benefits, problems have also been associated with the advent of MIS. Perhaps the most substantial limitation associated with MIS is the loss of haptic feedback; this deficit is at its most extreme in robot-assisted surgery, where at present such feedback is lost entirely [2]. The image-enhanced operating environment looks to mitigate for the loss of haptic feedback by providing the surgeon with visual cues to the subsurface anatomy. The use of intraoperative image guidance can be divided into that used for operative planning, to facilitate the rapid identification of critical anatomical structures, for example, and that used for task execution, an example of which is tumour resection [2]. These two steps have very different requirements, with the first needing a large amount of anatomical information to be displayed without the need to account for tissue deformation or accurate registration, while the second requires less information to be displayed, but with much greater spatial accuracy.