Augmented reality in craniomaxillofacial surgery: added value and proposed recommendations through a systematic review of the literature

This systematic review provides an overview of augmented reality (AR) and its benefits in craniomaxillofacial surgery in an attempt to answer the question: Is AR beneficial for craniomaxillofacial surgery? This review includes a description of the studies conducted, the systems used and their technical characteristics. The search was performed in four databases: PubMed, Cochrane Library, Embase, and Web of Science. All journal articles published during the past 11 years related to AR, mixed reality, craniomaxillofacial, and surgery were considered in this study. From a total of 7067 articles identified using AR- and surgery-related keywords, 39 articles were finally selected. Based on these articles, a classification of study types, surgery types, devices used, metrics reported, and benefits were collected. The findings of this review indicate that AR could provide various benefits, addressing the challenges of conventional navigation systems, such as hand–eye coordination and depth perception. However, three main concerns were raised while performing this study: (1) it is complicated to aggregate the metrics reported in the articles, (2) it is difficult to obtain statistical value from the current studies, and (3) user evaluation studies are lacking. This article concludes with recommendations for future studies by addressing the latter points.