Medical Augmented Reality based on Commercial Image Guided Surgery

Utilizing augmented reality for applications in medicine has been a topic of intense research for several years. A number of challenging tasks need to be addressed when designing a medical AR system. These include the import and management of medical datasets and preoperatively created planning data, the registration of the patient with respect to a global coordinate system, and accurate tracking of the camera used in the AR setup as well as the respective surgical instruments. Most research systems rely on specialized hardware or algorithms for realizing augmented reality in medicine. Such base technologies can be expensive or very time-consuming to implement. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach of building a surgical AR system by harnessing existing, commercially available equipment for image guided surgery (IGS). We describe the prototype of an augmented reality application, which receives all necessary information from a device for intraoperative navigation.