Surgeons should play a central role in disaster planning and management due to the overwhelming number of bodily injuries that are typically involved during most forms of disaster. In fact, various types of surgical procedures are performed by emergency medical teams after sudden-onset disasters, such as soft tissue wounds, orthopaedic traumas, abdominal surgeries, etc. HMD-based Augmented Reality (AR), using state-of-the-art hardware such as the Magic Leap or the Microsoft HoloLens, have long been foreseen as a key enabler for clinicians in surgical use cases, especially for procedures performed outside of the operating room. This paper describes the Use Case (UC) "AR-assisted emergency surgical care", identified in the context of the 5G-EPICENTRE EU-funded project. Specifically, the UC will experiment with holographic AR technology for emergency medical surgery teams, by overlaying deformable medical models directly on top of the patient body parts, effectively enabling surgeons to see inside (visualizing bones, blood vessels, etc.) and perform surgical actions following step-by-step instructions. The goal is to combine the computational and data-intensive nature of AR and Computer Vision algorithms with upcoming 5G network architectures deployed for edge computing so as to satisfy real-time interaction requirements and provide an efficient and powerful platform for the pervasive promotion of such applications. By developing the necessary Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) to manage data-intensive services (e.g., prerendering, caching, compression) and by exploiting available network resources and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) support, provided by the 5G-EPICENTRE infrastructure, this UC aims to provide powerful AR-based tools, usable on site, to first-aid responders.

翻译：外科医生在灾难规划和管理中应发挥核心作用，因为大多数灾难形式通常涉及大量的身体损伤。事实上，突发性灾难发生后，紧急医疗团队会执行各种类型的外科手术，如软组织创伤、骨科创伤、腹部手术等。基于头戴式显示器的增强现实技术，采用Magic Leap或Microsoft HoloLens等最先进的硬件，长期以来一直被视为临床医生在手术用例中的关键使能技术，尤其是在手术室外执行的手术中。本文描述了在欧盟资助的5G-EPICENTRE项目背景下确定的“AR辅助紧急手术护理”用例。具体而言，该用例将通过将可变形医学模型直接叠加在患者身体部位上，为紧急医疗手术团队实验全息增强现实技术，从而有效使外科医生能够透视（可视化骨骼、血管等）并按照逐步指令执行手术操作。目标是结合增强现实和计算机视觉算法的计算与数据密集型特性，与为边缘计算部署的新兴5G网络架构相结合，以满足实时交互需求，并为这类应用的普及推广提供高效且强大的平台。通过开发必要的虚拟网络功能来管理数据密集型服务（如预渲染、缓存、压缩），并利用5G-EPICENTRE基础设施提供的可用网络资源及多接入边缘计算支持，该用例旨在为急救人员提供可在现场使用的强大AR工具。