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Extended reality technologies for support of surgical workflows
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Current developments in the field of extended reality (XR) could prove useful in the optimization of surgical workflows, time effectiveness and postoperative outcome. Although still primarily a subject of research, the state of XR technologies is rapidly improving and approaching feasibility for a broad clinical application. Surgical fields of application of XR technologies are currently primarily training, preoperative planning and intraoperative assistance. For all three areas, products already exist (some clinically approved) and technical feasibility studies have been conducted. In teaching, the use of XR can already be assessed as fundamentally practical and meaningful but still needs to be evaluated in large multicenter studies. In preoperative planning XR can also offer advantages, although technical limitations often impede routine use; however, for cases of intraoperative use informative evaluation studies are mostly lacking, so that an assessment is not yet possible in a meaningful way. Furthermore, there is a lack of assessments regarding cost-effectiveness in all three areas. The XR technologies enable proven advantages in surgical workflows despite the lack of high-quality evaluation with respect to the practical and clinical use of XR. New concepts for effective interaction with XR media also need to be developed. In the future, further research progress and technical developments in the field can be expected.

Authors are Christoph Rüger, Simon Moosburner and Igor M. Sauer (Chirurg 2020; 91(7): 544-552).
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Our manuscript "Depletion of donor dendritic cells ameliorates immunogenicity of both skin and hind limb transplants" has been accepted for publication in Frontiers in Immunology, section Alloimmunity and Transplantation. Authors are Muhammad Imtiaz Ashraf, Joerg Mengwasser, Anja Reutzel-Selke, Dietrich Polenz, Kirsten Führer, Steffen Lippert, Peter Tang, Edward Michaelis, Rusan Catar, Johann Pratschke, Christian Witzel, Igor M. Sauer, Stefan G. Tullius, and Barbara Kern.

Acute cellular rejection remains a significant obstacle affecting successful outcomes of organ transplantation including vascularized composite tissue allografts (VCA). Donor antigen presenting cells (APC), particularly dendritic cells (DC), orchestrate early alloimmune responses by activating recipient effector T cells. Employing a targeted approach, we investigated the impact of donor-derived conventional DC (cDC) and APC on the immunogenicity of skin and skin-containing VCA grafts, using mouse models of skin and hind limb transplantation.
By post-transplantation day 6, skin grafts demonstrated severe rejections, characterized by predominance of recipient CD4 T cells. In contrast, hind limb grafts showed moderate rejection, primarily infiltrated by CD8 T cells. While donor depletion of cDC and APC reduced frequencies, maturation, and activation of DC in all analysed tissues of skin transplant recipients, reduction in DC activities was only observed in the spleen of hind limb recipients. Donor cDC and APC depletion did not impact all lymphocyte compartments but significantly affected CD8 T cells and activated CD4 T in lymph nodes of skin recipients. Moreover, both donor APC and cDC depletion attenuated the Th17 immune response, evident by significantly reduced Th17 (CD4+IL-17+) cells in the spleen of skin recipients and reduced levels of IL-17E and lymphotoxin-α in the serum samples of both skin and hind limb recipients. In conclusion, our findings underscore the highly immunogenic nature of skin component in VCA. The depletion of donor APC and cDC mitigates the immunogenicity of skin grafts while exerting minimal impact on VCA.

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