The Problem With Operating Near the Face
When a dog is diagnosed with an oral tumor — a mass on the jaw, the palate, or the maxillary bone — the surgery to remove it is among the most technically demanding in veterinary medicine. The structures involved are dense and closely packed: bone, nerve tissue, the roots of teeth, the boundaries of the eye socket. The goal of the surgeon is to remove every cancerous cell while leaving as much healthy tissue intact as possible. Getting that margin wrong in either direction has lasting consequences for the patient. Take too little, and the tumor returns. Take too much, and the dog loses function it cannot recover — the ability to eat comfortably, to vocalize normally, to move its mouth without pain.
For years, veterinary surgeons have relied on the same tools their predecessors used: pre-operative imaging reviewed on a separate screen before the first incision, mental translation of that imaging into three-dimensional spatial understanding once the surgery begins, and the accumulated judgment of experience. What they have not had — until now — is a way to bring that imaging into the surgical field itself, overlaid directly on what the surgeon is looking at while operating.
A study published June 24, 2026 in the American Journal of Veterinary Research just changed what that sentence means.
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What AR Surgery Looks Like
The technology at the center of the study is a pair of augmented reality glasses — commercially available AR eyewear adapted for surgical use — that project holographic images directly into the wearer's field of view. In the UC Davis pilot study, researchers developed an application compatible with XReal AR glasses that allowed veterinarians to see a three-dimensional hologram of a dog's head overlaid onto the actual surgical field in real time. Tumor margins, anatomical landmarks, and diagnostic imaging data appeared not on a screen across the room, but floating in the surgeon's line of sight, precisely positioned on the patient.
According to the study published in the AJVR, AR-guided visualization directly overlaid onto the surgical field may improve spatial accuracy during intricate procedures without compromising speed.
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The team enrolled 22 licensed veterinarians from UC Davis — residents and board-certified specialists from dentistry and oral surgery, orthopedic surgery, and neurology and neurosurgery. Participants completed coordinate and outline tasks on a holographic dog head under two conditions: transferring targets memorized from a screen, and working with targets displayed directly on the hologram. The results were measured in millimeters of error and percentage of area coverage.
The numbers were significant. Mean distance error was lower with AR guidance — 2.73 mm versus 3.42 mm without it. Area coverage improved from 63.3% without AR to 83.7% with it. Crucially, completion times did not increase for the area-tracing task. The surgeons were more accurate, and they were not slower.
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Why Accuracy at That Scale Matters
A difference of less than one millimeter in spatial error may sound like a rounding problem. In oral surgery near the eye socket or the base of the skull, it is the difference between a clean margin and a recurrence, or between preserved nerve function and its absence. Oral tumors in dogs — including oral melanoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and fibrosarcoma — are among the most common canine cancers, and surgical outcome is heavily dependent on the precision of the initial resection.
Lead author Dr. Stephanie Goldschmidt, associate professor of dentistry and oral surgery at UC Davis, said: "Augmented reality technology has the potential to enhance surgical precision by overlaying 3D diagnostic imaging and biologic information directly onto the animal patient."
The implications extend beyond oncology. The study authors noted that AR-guided navigation could eventually assist with any veterinary procedure that requires precise three-dimensional spatial orientation — neurosurgical approaches, orthopedic reconstruction, spinal decompression. In each of those contexts, the gap between what a surgeon can see on a pre-operative scan and what they can perceive intraoperatively is a known source of error. AR doesn't eliminate that gap. It collapses it.
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The Human Connection
For Owen Lafferty, whose Border Terrier Biscotti was diagnosed with a maxillary tumor in San Diego in early 2026, the surgery conversation with the veterinary oncology team focused heavily on margins. The tumor was small but positioned close to the orbital rim. The surgeon told Owen that the goal was complete excision with clean margins — and that the anatomy in that region made certainty difficult.
Biscotti's surgery was performed without AR guidance, using conventional imaging review. The margins came back clean. Owen considers himself fortunate. He read about the UC Davis study afterward and sat with it for a while.
"If there's technology that makes the surgeon more accurate at that scale," he said, "I'd want my dog to have it. It seems obvious."
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Where This Goes Next
The study is explicitly a proof of concept. The 22 veterinarians worked with a holographic model, not a living patient in an active operating room. The next stages of research will need to address the practical challenges of surgical AR in a real clinical environment — sterile field management, software reliability, the ergonomics of wearing a computing device during a procedure that may last several hours.
The AVMA-published study described the pilot as an important step toward integrating the technology into veterinary head and neck surgeries such as operating on tumors, noting that accurately identifying and removing cancerous lesions while avoiding healthy tissue is critical to reducing patient morbidity.
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AR use is expanding rapidly in human surgical medicine, where it has already been applied to spinal surgery, orthopedics, and neurosurgery with documented improvements in precision. The question for veterinary medicine is not whether the technology will arrive — it is how quickly the research pipeline can validate it for clinical use and how soon it will be accessible at the level of the specialist practices where most canine cancer surgeries happen today.
For Owen Lafferty, Biscotti finished her post-surgical monitoring in May 2026. She is eating normally, gaining weight, and has resumed the morning walks that she treats, he says, as the most important appointment of the day. The margins are still clean.
