Survey of Immersive Techniques for Surgical Care Telemedicine Applications

Telemedicine is one of the rising and innovative tools in medicine that allows the remote delivery of health services over the internet. This technology enables people who do not have direct and urgent access to expert medical care to still get the services they need. Applications of telemedicine include telesurgeries, telementoring, teleproctoring and teleconsulting. Telesurgery is the case where an expert surgeon remotely performs a surgery on a patient while not physically in the operation room over a wired/wireless connection. Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are widely used to give the remote surgeon the required immersive experience and allow him/her to see exactly what the local surgeon is seeing. This paper focuses on surveying the current technologies used in telesurgeries. It starts off by exploring the tools used to create the immersive experience in telesurgery such as 3D cameras and 360 cameras, the headpieces and the robots used to give the remote surgeon the real feel and control of the surgery. It then continues to survey the techniques used to create that immersive experience including the different camera encodings, depth compression and estimation techniques and 3D modeling. Finally it briefly overviews some of the networking issues regarding the streaming of 3D videos in real-time.