Minimally invasive surgical visualization: experience in transition.
Minimally invasive surgical visualization currently is in a process of open-ended transformation. When video was first applied to endoscopy, the imaging performance was so poor it was believed that the only way to make it more useful was to make it more realistic, more like what one would see by looking directly at the tissue in question. But in the course of using electronic imaging and computer technology to make these improvements, clinicians came to learn that there is a great deal of additional, and often nonvisible, information that they can bring to bear on an understanding of what is going on in the surgical site. It now is clear that the most useful images in the future of minimally invasive surgery will be those that contain a combination of realistic and hyperrealistic content. The collective work among physicians and engineers currently aims to reduce the deficiencies of realistic images, identify valuable hyperrealistic techniques, and synthesize and render this information in an intuitive and comprehensible way.