The documentation of surgical procedures has been a practice dating back to ancient times, with various methods evolving over the centuries. In ancient Egypt, the vizier Imhotep authored the first known treatise on surgery around 2700 BCE. Historically, surgeries were documented through writing, painting, and drawing for both posterity and educational purposes. One notable example is Rembrandt’s 1632 oil painting, “The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp.”

The advent of photography in the early 1800s revolutionized surgical documentation, particularly in plastic and reconstructive surgery, to capture pre- and post-operative appearances (Rogers, 1991). In 1863, James Balossa took the first photograph of a surgical procedure for his book on nasal reconstruction (Wallace, 1985). The introduction of medical photography journals by Maury and Duhring in 1870 further advanced the field. In 1899, Argentinian surgeon Alejandro Posadas recorded a surgical procedure using ‘moving pictures’ when he filmed the removal of a pulmonary cyst (Viegas, 2015).

The 20th century saw a surge in film recording of surgeries, which accelerated with the development of digital video technology and smaller recording devices. Digital video technology, which encodes moving visual images in an electronic format rather than on film, became prevalent. Unlike analog videos that represent still images captured on film, digital videos are sequences of ones and zeros encoded electronically.

This technology has diverse applications in surgery, including:

• Archiving data (Gambadauro & Magos, 2012)

• Evaluating technical skills (Kasparian, Martinez, JoverClos, & Chercoles, 2014)

• Facilitating self-reflection (Casswell, Salam, Sullivan, & Ezra, 2016)

• Enabling teleconferencing (Obuchi et al., 2011)

• Assessing team performance (Guerlain et al., 2005)

• Recording minimally invasive procedures (Kaiser & Corman, 2001)

• Enhancing patient safety (Anthony et al., 2003)

• Conducting surgical “black box” analyses (Bowermaster et al., 2015)

• Serving medicolegal purposes (Turnbull & Emsley, 2014)