Lyka Smith
Surgical
Planning MR

Surgical planning lives across CT slices, case reports and monitors, all of it flat, all of it somewhere other than the patient. Surgeons are asked to hold the three-dimensional picture in their heads while the data sits in two dimensions around the room.

Lyka Smith, an Australian medical innovation company, wanted that planning material brought together where it is actually used: in the room, around the patient.

Through a mixed reality headset, the clinician’s workspace assembles in the air around them: CT imaging in its axial and coronal views, the full surgical planning case report ready to page through, and the patient’s 3D anatomy floating where it can be examined from any angle.

The anatomy aligns over the patient in the chair, complete with left and right markers, closing the gap between the plan and the person it belongs to.

Because the experience runs in passthrough mixed reality, nothing about the real environment disappears. The patient, the room and the clinician’s own hands stay in view while the digital material takes position in the space between them.

That is the difference between reading about anatomy and standing inside the case: scans stop being slices on a monitor and become structures with depth, scale and orientation.

Panels can be grabbed, repositioned and pinned wherever they are most useful. The case report sits in one hand while imaging hangs alongside, and the 3D model responds to natural hand interaction.

The result is a planning session that moves at the speed of the clinician, with every reference a glance away instead of a walk across the room.

The experience demonstrates what clinical planning looks like when the data joins the clinician in the room: faster reference, clearer spatial understanding and a stronger connection between plan and patient.

For Lyka Smith, it is a showcase of Australian medical innovation at the edge of what mixed reality makes possible in healthcare.