Augmented Reality in Surgical Navigation: A Review of Evaluation and Validation Metrics

Pre-operative imaging has been used earlier to guide traditional surgical navigation systems. There has been a lot of effort in the last decade to integrate augmented reality into the operating room to help surgeons intra-operatively. An augmented reality (AR) based navigation system provides a clear three-dimensional picture of the interested areas over the patient to aid surgical navigation and operations, which is a promising approach. The goal of this study is to review the application of AR technology in various fields of surgery and how the technology is used for its performance in each field. Assessment of the available AR assisted navigation systems being used for surgery is reviewed in this paper. Furthermore, a discussion about the required evaluation and validation metric for these systems is also presented. The paper comprehensively reviews the literature since the year 2008 for providing relevant information on applying the AR technology for training, planning and surgical navigation. It also describes the limitations which need to be addressed before one can completely rely on this technology for surgery. Thus, additional research is desirable in this emerging field, particularly to evaluate and validate the use of AR technology for surgical navigation.