What is it about?
Visualizing medical data such as organs is important in medical procedures such as needle biopsies. Typically, doctors use 2D CT scans and ultrasound to determine where to insert the needle. This paper presents an Augmented Reality (AR) visualization method that allows users to view a patient's organs directly on top of the patient virtually in AR.
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Why is it important?
This work focuses on a system that works on a body part that has very few discernible features (the abdomen). This means that we need a method to detect it that does not rely on visual cues. To accomplish this, we use a unique combination of marker-less and marker based approaches. The marker is used to initially detect the abdomen location, and then we do some marker-less computation to finally align the AR content with the patient. This is different from other works that require many markers to function, which is difficult to set up accurately, or that require a lot of extra sensors or invisible markers to function as marker-less. Our system is easy to set up and use. It requires one smartphone and one marker placed approximately on the navel.
Perspectives
I hope that this work sparks new ideas for AR visualizations for commonly overlooked bedside procedures such as needle biopsies in order to improve patient care. Additionally, markers might be considered old news, but they do serve a purpose for the quick detection of important landmarks. Without the marker, the task of detecting the abdomen becomes much more difficult since this region has very few visual features that are detectable using computer vision methods.
Isabela Figueira
University of California, Irvine
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Augmented Reality Patient-Specific Registration for Medical Visualization, November 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3562939.3565689.
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