Computer technology has opened up a whole new world for surgeons and patients. Computer-assisted surgeries can be categorized in a myriad of ways and include medical image processing and visualization, such as CT, MRI, ultrasound or angiography; surgical simulation which uses medical image information for optimizing the surgical procedure; and surgical navigation that provides image registration between pre- and intraoperative images, and organ deformation analysis. Surgical navigation also offers the surgical team with images of a patient in surgery and includes endoscope, ultrasonography, interventional CT/MRI, and surgical stereoscopic displays.

Computers can assist in the overall treatment of a patient by limiting the amount of surgical time required in the operating room, monitoring the anesthesia, allow for less invasive surgery, and decrease the amount of time spent of hospitalization and decreases the overall costs of care.

In education, computers are used as support technology in the area of decision-making in surgeries and provides support training of surgical skills.

However, computers in surgery will never replace the importance of the surgeon's own decision-making process. CAS is available...

In recent years, research in virtual reality in surgical procedures, including stereoscopic display, force-feedback and human-machine interface are extremely important in CAS research.
The computer-assisted minimally invasive surgery project or CAMIS, which began in September 1994 and was completed in June 2000, integrated CAS with magnetic resonance imaging or computerized tomography and non-invasive real time imaging, such as 3-D ultrasound.

The goal of this project was to improve surgical precision and patient outcomes by enabling surgeons to obtain accurate 3-D images of internal surgical fields before and during surgery. The $10 million funding was received from Congress through the office of the Air Force Surgeon General and provided valuable information on interventional breast and other biopsies, orthopedic surgeries, craniofacial reconstruction, and endoscopic surgery.

CAMIS proved valuable technical and economic benefits in its use. Total hospital stays and health care costs for craniotomy surgeries were reduced by 20%. Savings to the U.S. public of $27 billion annually in…