Improved Navigated Spine Surgery Utilizing Augmented Reality Visualization

Image-guided surgical systems are increasingly becoming established tools for visual aid in several interventional procedures. In this paper, we introduce a prototypic add-on system for enhancing the intraoperative visualization within a navigated spine surgery utilizing an extended reality approach. In essence, operation-specific important anatomical structures are segmented from preoperative patient data and superimposed on the video stream of the operation field. In addition, slices of the anatomy data, as well as shape and depth information of targeted structures, like spinal nerves or herniated discs, can be blended, which allows for a better protection of risk anatomy and accurate identification of the structures under consideration, and thus raises the safety and accuracy factors of the intervention.