From Open, Laparoscopic or Robotic Surgical Interventions to the Prospects of Image-Guided Involvement

This review aims to place open, laparoscopic, robotic and image-guided robotic surgical interventions in the context of complex medical surgeries, taking into account patient well-being, staff effort and task reliability. It deduces the specificities of each technique and subsequently focuses on image-guided interventions and their practice in staff training, preparation and implementation of a possible autonomous intervention. These complex interventions are intended to be minimally invasive (MI), precise and safe therapies. The accuracy of robotic positioning could be improved by reductions in complexity and un-certainty involved in the intervention procedure. These can be achieved by matching the real controlled procedure and its virtual replica. The contribution discusses considera-tions for staff training and/or planning of surgical interventions using real and virtual phantoms, and the use of augmented matched digital twins (DT) for real interventions. The different topics presented in the article, although explicit, are reinforced by examples from the literature to facilitate a deeper understanding. The results of this review highlight the importance of robotic imaging-assisted procedures involving MI, nonionizing and precise interventions. Moreover, DTs currently integrated in different health applications, combined with digital tools, could provide an effective solution for the management of such interventions.