A Portable Immersive Surgery Training System Using RGB-D Sensors

Surgical training plays an important role in assisting residents to develop critical skills. Providing effective surgical training, however, remains as a challenging task. Existing videotaped training instructions can only show imagery from a fixed viewpoint that lacks both depth perception and interactivity. We present a new portable immersive surgical training system that is capable of acquiring and displaying high fidelity 3D reconstructions of actual surgical procedures. Our solution utilizes a set of Microsoft Kinect sensors to simultaneously recover the participants, the surgical environment, and the surgical scene itself. We then develop a space-time navigator to allow the trainees to witness and explore a prior procedure as if they were there. Preliminary feedback from residents shows that our system is much more effective than conventional videotaped system.