Supporting Collaborative Discussions In Surgical Teleconsulting Through Augmented Reality Head Mounted Displays

Although Augmented Reality (AR) has been touted as the future of surgery, its contribution to distributed collaboration such as in surgical teleconsulting has not been articulated. We propose AR-Head Mounted Displays (AR-HMD) to tackle two previously-identified challenges: operating surgeons needing to view and interact with imaging systems that reside away from the operative field, and, their lack of gesturing tools to point and annotate on the shared images and physical environment. We report on a controlled lab experiment where 12 expert gynecology surgeons perform a tumor localisation task guided by a remote radiologist (confederate) via an AR-HMD. We find that bringing the shared images to the place of work reduces the need for clarifications and provides opportunistic access to information when required, and, that pointing and annotating provides opportunities to further support verbal instruction in deictic communication. Our results inform the design of intraoperative AR-HMD systems for surgical telecollaboration.