SciKit-Surgery provides open source libraries to support research and translation of applications for augmented reality in surgery. This paper discusses recent developments in SciKit-Surgery and case studies of SciKit-Surgery's use for applications such as SmartLiver, SciKit-SurgeryBARD and SciKit-Surgery's use to support research into visualisation and user interface design for augmented reality in surgery.

The availability of high quality software tools for research and translation is a key enabler for scientific progress. Research into surgical robotics, image guided surgery, and augmented reality for surgery brings together many disciplines and depends on a strong engineering base to provide the tools that researchers need (hardware interfaces, data management, data processing, visualisation, user interfaces). SciKit-Surgery was conceived as a more accessible replacement for existing toolkits written predominantly in C. Experience has taught us that whilst implementations in C could be robust and offer optimised performance, the need to learn the language and the difficulties of maintaining cross platform compilation presented too high a barrier to entry for the vast majority of researchers.