710188SmartShadowClosedGRD Proof of ConceptInnovate UKMinimally invasive surgery (MIS) or ‘keyhole surgery’ is one of the most significant developments in the field of medicine in recent history, gaining widespread acceptance across many surgical disciplines. However, surgeons learning and performing MIS procedures are faced with a unique set of challenges. The main challenge in MIS is the use of a video image to view the patients internal anatomy or operative field. Drawbacks associated with the use of video imaging include loss of depth vision due to the image being 2-D. The loss of depth vision has been shown to lead to impaired performance in surgical tasks. Generally, there is always a demand for surgery to become safer and reducing these vision constraints would help significantly. Improving depth perception, facilitating instrument navigation, and manoeuvring in MIS should be a priority. Although advances in camera technology aim to improve depth perception, such systems have limitations with respect to their use, as they tend to be expensive and not widely available. For these reasons, it is useful to investigate other alternatives for conveying depth information in MIS. It is well known that monocular cues i.e. perspective, relative size, can provide adequate depth information for the performance of most MIS tasks. One of the primary monocular cues is shadow but due to the arrangement of the camera (endoscope) and light source used, shadow is missing in MIS rendering the operative scene shadowless. We are proposing to further the development of our ‘SmartShadow’ system that introduces a faint secondary light source into the operative field that casts a weak shadow of the surgical instruments that is invisible to the human eye but detectable by a computer. The computer detects the faint shadow then enhances it to create a digital shadow, which it then introduces into the video image to be viewed by the surgeon to aid depth perception to facilitate and enhance performance of surgical tasks.