Despite the complexity of minimally invasive surgery (MIS) of the liver, no system in clinical practice today enhances the digitalized laparoscopic view to facilitate the surgery 1. Further, all robotic surgery currently in use facilitate MIS by providing “tele-manipulation” (the surgeons performs the surgery remote from the patient), without the creation of an automatically enhanced interface (augmented reality, AR) between the patient and the operating surgeon. 2 AR, however, could help to overcome the difficulties of laparoscopic surgery in general and advanced laparoscopic liver surgery specifically: loss of depth perception, decreased spatial understanding and tactile feedback in the three dimensional space of the liver, and complicated 3D anatomy without significant outward landmarks.
See the original post here: http://www.journalacs.org/article/S1072-7515(16)30681-0/abstract