Development of a Surgical Navigation System Based on Augmented Reality

Surgical navigation systems allowed for more minimally invasive procedures, leading to better patient outcomes, reduced risk of infection, less pain, shorter hospital stays and faster recoveries. However, the surgeon must shift their attention from the patient to the monitor for guidance, which takes cognitive and motor tasks and negatively affected with attention shifts. Augmented reality (AR), which merges the realworld surgical scene with preoperative virtual patient images and plans, has been proposed as a solution to this drawback. However, when moving the surgeon’s body, he/she still can not immediately see through the inner image for patient from several angles. This project proposed AR-glasses-integrated apparatuses and methods for surgical operation navigation, and can superimpose virtual images on real images. It includes three systems, which can quickly display virtual image and reduce the lag of instant display of virtual images. The first system combines optical positioning system, providing more accurate superimposition of virtual images on real images, including accurate superimposition of 3D images and 2D images. The second system is image-guided surgery, providing three-dimensional superimposition of virtual images on real images, and display important information such as an enter point of a operation, under the situation that a navigation system is not necessary. The third system builds a multi-device multi-positioning-mode system, integrates the advantages of the first and the second apparatuses, provides a switch mode between the first apparatus and the second apparatus, and achieves long-distance and multi-user functions. Moreover, these systems are directly provided to subproject II and subproject III.

Project ID:PB10707-0070
External Project ID:MOST107-2221-E182-052