In the era of minimal invasive surgery, a good quality imaging system is needed to advance laparoscopic surgery. The imaging chain system offers visual interface between the surgeon and the operative field during laparoscopic surgery. In spite of the development and advancement of image systems, task performance is significantly degraded by the current laparoscopic video system, as compared to human binocular vision. The degraded image quality is associated with the systems that acquire, process and display image. The research and development of ergonomics and the optimization of imaging chains for laparoscopic surgery has much progressed in recent years, and this advance helped to avoid degraded image quality and to improve surgical performance. We review the image system, and the digital image processing and display system to optimize the performance of laparoscopic surgery.

Keywords: Laparoscopy, Minimally invasive surgical procedures, Three-dimensional imaging