Background: Tele-mentoring facilitates the transfer of surgical knowledge. The objective of this work is to develop a tele-mentoring framework that enables a specialist surgeon to mentor an operating surgeon by transferring information in a form of surgical instruments' motion required during a minimally invasive surgery.
Method: A tele-mentoring framework is developed to transfer video stream of the surgical field, poses of the scope and port placement from the operating room to a remote location. From the remote location, the motion of virtual surgical instruments augmented onto the surgical field is sent to the operating room.
Results: The proposed framework is suitable to be integrated with laparoscopic as well as robotic surgeries. It takes on average 1.56 s to send information from the operating room to the remote location and 0.089 s for vice versa over a local area network.
Conclusions: The work demonstrates a tele-mentoring framework that enables a specialist surgeon to mentor an operating surgeon during a minimally invasive surgery.
Keywords: augmented reality; minimally invasive surgeries; tele-mentoring; telemedicine.
© 2021 The Authors. The International Journal of Medical Robotics and Computer Assisted Surgery published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.