Realizing a Clearer View: New Augmented Reality Systems Provide Medical Students with a Surgeon?s Sight

In March 2017, Dr. Marc Tewfik performed a delicate operation to remove cancerous tissue from a patient's sinus cavity, something that he has done many times before at the McGill University Health Center (MUHC) in Montr'al, Canada. But this time, things were a bit different. Before performing such a minimally invasive surgery using a thin laparoscopic device inserted through the nose, the exact surgical plan was worked out in meticulous detail. Tewfik (Figure 1) used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to plot a pathway for the surgical tools to reach the target tissue without endangering arteries or nerves in an area just fractions of an inch from the optic nerve and from the brain itself.