Multimodal mixed reality visualisation for surgical guidance
Researchers at Imperial College London have developed a MR visualisation platform which projects multiple imaging modalities to assist intraoperative surgical guidance.
A Hamlyn-led project that introduced a novel Mixed reality (MR) visualisation platform for intra-operative surgical guidance has won the IPCAI 2020 Audience Award. MR is emerging as a vital tool in surgery as it enables the surgeon to visualise subsurface anatomical structures in 3D. In the last decade, there has been a great effort to bring MR into the operating room to assist surgeons intra-operatively.
The virtual objects, showing a patient’s data, can be consulted by a surgeon for decision-making and can also be moved around the operating room using mid-air hand gestures. Therefore, MR allows a surgeon to consult data when and where needed, making it a valuable tool for surgery.
Regardless of numerous research efforts contributed to MR technology development for clinical applications, the progress of this type of development is still at an early stage.
Collaborated with Department of Surgery and Cancer, the researchers at the Hamlyn Centre proposed a MR visualisation platform for the Microsoft HoloLens, aiming to assist surgeons during the surgery in the operating room. The platform contains three visualisation components, namely a 3D organ model, volumetric data, and tissue morphology captured with intra-operative imaging modalities. Furthermore, a set of novel interactive functionalities have been designed including scrolling through volumetric data and adjustment of the virtual objects’ transparency.
The research team invited a group of surgeons to participate in this project. The participants were allowed to interact with the visualisation components and test the different functionalities. The majority of the surgeons found the proposed visualisation platform intuitive and would use it in their operating rooms for intra-operative surgical guidance.
This pilot study verified the potential of the proposed visualisation platform and its usability in the operating room. The future work our research team plans to carry out is to focus on enhancing the platform by incorporating the surgeons’ suggestions and conducting extensive evaluation on a large group of surgeons.
The research was published in International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery.
Source: Imperial College London
