Utilizing image guided surgery for user interaction in medical augmented reality
Jan Fischer, Dirk Bartz · 2005
The graphical overlay of additional medical information over the patient during a surgical procedure has long been considered one of the most promising applications of augmented reality. While many experimental systems for augmented reality in medicine have reached an advanced state and can deliver high-quality augmented video streams, they usually depend heavily on specialized dedicated hardware. Such dedicated system components, which originally have been designed for engineering applications or VR research, often are ill-suited for use in the clinical practice. We have described a novel medical augmented reality application, which is based almost exclusively on existing, commercially available, and certified medical equipment [9]. In our system, a so-called image guided surgery device is used for tracking a webcam, which delivers the digital video stream of the physical scene that is augmented with the virtual information.