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I N T R A O P
V I S U A L I Z A T I O N
surgical microscope. I've also seen surgeons performing open surgery
do the same, preferring the image provided by an HD camera over
what they saw directly through their loupes.
As video quality advances and images become more powerful,
more surgery will be done with video images than direct vision, even
during open surgery. OSM
Dr. Atkinson (jatkinson@mednet. ucla.edu) is professor of surgery and
chief medical officer at UCLA Health in Los Angeles.
IMAGING POSSIBILITIES
Does 3D Make a Difference?
T
SEE CHANGE Three-dimensional imaging
hree-dimenimproves a surgeon's depth perception.
sional imaging offers
laparoscopic surgeons the promise of
performing surgical
tasks more effectively, but a pair of studies differ on whether
that's actually the
case.
During two-dimensional laparoscopy, surgeons lose depth perception
and must adapt to learned visual cues observed on fixed flat panel monitors, say researchers at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.
In the April-June issue of the Journal of Minimal Access Surgery, they
tested the abilities of novice, intermediate and expert surgeons to complete 4 running sutures and a simple suture line followed by an intracor-
7 4
O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E | N O V E M B E R 2013
