AR-Assisted Surgical Care via 5G networks for First Aid Responders

Surgeons should play a central role in disaster planning and management due to the overwhelming number of bodily injuries that are typically involved during most forms of disaster. In fact, various types of surgical procedures are performed by emergency medical teams after sudden-onset disasters, such as soft tissue wounds, orthopaedic traumas, abdominal surgeries, etc. HMD-based Augmented Reality (AR), using state-of-the-art hardware such as the Magic Leap or the Microsoft HoloLens, have long been foreseen as a key enabler for clinicians in surgical use cases, especially for procedures performed outside of the operating room. This paper describes the Use Case (UC) "AR-assisted emergency surgical care", identified in the context of the 5G-EPICENTRE EU-funded project. Specifically, the UC will experiment with holographic AR technology for emergency medical surgery teams, by overlaying deformable medical models directly on top of the patient body parts, effectively enabling surgeons to see inside (visualizing bones, blood vessels, etc.) and perform surgical actions following step-by-step instructions. The goal is to combine the computational and data-intensive nature of AR and Computer Vision algorithms with upcoming 5G network architectures deployed for edge computing so as to satisfy real-time interaction requirements and provide an efficient and powerful platform for the pervasive promotion of such applications. By developing the necessary Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) to manage data-intensive services (e.g., prerendering, caching, compression) and by exploiting available network resources and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) support, provided by the 5G-EPICENTRE infrastructure, this UC aims to provide powerful AR-based tools, usable on site, to first-aid responders.