Augmented Reality in Surgery: A New Approach to Enhance the Surgeon's Experience

Abstract

In the surgical field, the patient's needs and requirements increasingly follow the newest technological developments. Nowadays it is still problematic to implement different types of technologies in operating environments due to the drawbacks that these can bring to their users and their longstanding learning process. A research was carried out with the objective of clarifying concepts and gathering some existing approaches to the solution of these problems as well as the respective technologies used. This chapter addresses a new concept of mobile applications for surgical planning using augmented reality technologies. The proposed solution aims to help the surgeon from the planning stage to the surgery intervention itself. In addition to some examples and practical demonstrations of the solution, its implementation process and system architecture are described and explained. Based on the developed prototype, the advantages of its use in a surgical context are discussed, being pointed out some improvements to be made.