ADAPTIVE IMAGING

Adaptive Anatomy

ADAPTIVE ANATOMY

Adaptive Anatomy is a new concept for displaying images in the operating theatre using mixed reality.

With the improved capabilities of sensor and display technologies, medical screens have become mobile, touch-sensitive, flexible and, in the most recent development, transparent. The introduction of transparent displays has the potential to fundamentally change the concept of intra-operative imaging and interaction in the operating theatre. While standard computer monitors generally relegate viewers to a static and passive position, adaptive imaging combines imaging technology and design principles from image fusion and augmented reality to display patient-related information directly in the surgeon’s field of view. Seen through a transparent head-mounted display, medical data overlays and annotates the surgeon’s vision with anatomical information by synchronising with the scale and position of the patient in real time. As this eliminates the offset between image and patient, surgeons do not need to continuously switch back and forth between screen and surgical site in order to view information, resulting in improved hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness.

While a broad range of studies have demonstrated the technical feasibility and limitations of mixed reality applications and presented clinical use cases, the constantly increasing market expectations urgently call for the validation of suitable workflows and their impact on decision-making processes in the operating theatre, an area that remains underresearched. To meet this gap, Adaptive Anatomy

a) determines the intra-operative situations and workflows that can benefit from mixed reality visualisations,

b) identifies the design strategies required to efficiently integrate 4D images into surgical workflows with regard to both patient-specific and task-specific data, and

c) defines the expertise that surgeons requires in order to cope with this new architecture of image display in the operating theatre. By looking beyond the technical means of 4D visualisations (tracking, registration, image quality, etc.), Adaptive Anatomy presents surgical staff with an approach that equips them to better understand the problems that mixed reality is actually able to solve.

Moritz Queisner, Michael Pogorzhelskiy, Christopher Remde, Rainer Windolph
– Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Prof. Dr. Igor M. Sauer
– Future Lab, Department of Experimental Surgery, Charité Universitätzmedizin Berlin

The project is funded by the German Research Foundation and
Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin.