Remote surgical expertise for armed forces forward surgery: RAPACE project

In military practice, support during deployment relies on a great versatility of health personnel, on light and proven equipments, and a reactive operational sanitary evacuation chain.
However, the evolution towards the hyper-specialization of the civilian environment exposes to difficulty in maintaining the versatility of military personnel. Moreover, the modern evolution of combat in hostile environments has led to the notion of prolonged fielf care.
Surgical tele-assistance by augmented reality (AR) could meet these different constraints. The RAPACE project (Augmented Reality for Expert Surgical Assistance) aims to offer the surgeon real-time access to multimodal information without interrupting his gesture. This interactive tool allows the operator on site to have continuous information from the remote expert surgeon, immersed in the surgical environment, allowing optimal care of the injured in emergency circumstances in remote area.
Yvain Goudard, Laure Salou-Régis, Olivier Barbier, Paul Balandraud.
Key word
Augmented reality, surgical telementoring, forward surgery