Visual and haptic augmentation technologies for surgical navigation
Yoshihiro Kuroda, Osamu Oshiro · 2010
Augmented Reality (AR) technologies have been applied in clinical applications, such as surgical navigation systems. Especially, visual augmentation has been pursued in the last decade. The visual-based AR surgical navigation visualizes a target object hidden behind other tissue to guide a surgeon to the target. However, the point-based registration still remains problems of estimating the target inside the body, mainly because of non-rigidity of a human body. We propose an anatomical fiducial line based registration method, which uses a vessel neighboring a target tissue as a fiducial to calculate the transformation matrix between two spaces. The result of experiments showed high robustness in estimating target positions. On the other hand, haptic-based AR surgical navigation helps the manipulation directly to avoid invasion of a surgical tool into the important anatomical areas, such as vessels and nerves. Foregoing studies developed a tactile display that generates tactile sensation on the stimulated area by the device. However, the devices disturb the surgeon's manipulation. We developed a spatially transparent tactile display, which generates tactile sensation on the fingertip without stimulating the fingertip itself. We developed a prototype system for haptic guidance and examined its performance.