Real-Time Range Imaging in Health Care: A Survey

The recent availability of dynamic, dense, and low-cost range imaging has gained widespread interest in health care. It opens up new opportunities and has an increasing impact on both research and commercial activities. This chapter presents a state-of-the-art survey on the integration of modern range imaging sensors into medical applications. The scope is to identify promising applications and methods, and to provide an overview of recent developments in this rapidly evolving domain. The survey covers a broad range of topics, including guidance in computer-assisted interventions, operation room monitoring and workflow analysis, touch-less interaction and on-patient visualization, as well as prevention and support in elderly care and rehabilitation. We put emphasis on dynamic and interactive tasks where real-time and dense 3-D imaging forms the key aspect. While considering different range imaging modalities that fulfill these requirements, we particularly investigate the impact of Time-of-Flight imaging in this domain. Eventually, we discuss practical demands and limitations, and open research issues and challenges that are of fundamental importance for the progression of the field.