Augmented Reality
Goals:
- Better situation awareness and safety
- Improved surgeon performance and clinical outcome
We use liver cancer surgery to illustrate how engineering advances analogous to those in avionics can advance robotic surgery. With augmented reality, the liver can be rendered semi-transparent with the cancerous tumor, blood vessels, and bile duct seen as vivid, solid 3D objects. The display can track and align with the location and shape of the organ, which moves and changes its shape during surgery.
A virtual surgical envelope can let surgeons use spectroscopic, ultrasound or biomarker based nano-probes to detect the boundary of cancerous tumor and delineate a dissection plane that encompasses the whole tumor with a clear tissue margin.
