Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences

Augmented reality could soon let surgeons peer inside a patient’s body without needing to make a large incision, helping them to carry out keyhole surgery.

By donning an augmented reality headset, a surgeon will see a virtual 3D map of a patient’s internal organs overlaid directly onto their body as they lie on an operating table. The system has been tested using data from people projected onto a surgical mannequin during simulated operations (see photo, above).

Surgeons could tag virtual organs with notes before an operation to help guide their procedure, says Simon Karger, who led the development of the tech at Cambridge Consultants in Boston, Massachusetts. A doctor might highlight a nerve bundle that should be avoided or label which part of an organ should be removed, for example.

Later versions of the system could include real-time feedback to help guide less experienced surgeons through complicated procedures, says Karger. “We can take these very complicated specialist procedures and make them accessible to far less specialist surgeons,” he says.

But Shafi Ahmed, a surgeon at Royal London Hospital who live-streamed an operation in virtual reality last year, thinks that no amount of help from augmented reality can replace the hands-on experience of a specialist surgeon. “We can’t trust these systems at the moment,” he says. But he believes they could be precursors to fully automated surgical systems.