Augmented/Mixed Reality Technologies Supporting Digital Surgery

The operating room of the future implements a broad set of digital technologies, aimed to improve the quality of care, optimize patient outcome and enhance usability of existing surgical tools. While analyzing and visualizing surgical data and available digital information anytime on demand become a key piece of the modern surgical workflow, their integration remained difficult until the recent advancements of augmented/mixed reality technologies, applications and devices. This systematic review aims to collect and compare outcomes of the most recent (2019–21) articles on the topic of Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) used in the medical domain, focusing on surgical practice. The usability of heads-up holographic technology is getting more and more attention through the years on this field too, but comparisons of used devices and benchmarking are still missing. As further technological improvements are still ongoing, possible standards are required to guide future research and applications of AR/MR from surgical trainee assessment to situation awareness (SA). With examining existing recent studies this review could take a possible first step towards the intention of unified standardisation.