Using a smart phone for information rendering in Computer-Aided Surgery

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of smartphones as an interactive device for visualizing and navigating patient data during computer-aided surgery, aiming to improve surgeon-patient interaction and precision.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of smartphones in surgical navigation, demonstrating their potential to enhance interaction and accuracy in computer-aided procedures.

Findings

Smartphones can effectively display surgical navigation data.

Operators performed puncturing tasks with improved precision using smartphones.

The approach offers a portable and intuitive interface for surgical navigation.

Abstract

Computer-aided surgery intensively uses the concept of navigation: after having collected CT data from a patient and transferred them to the operating room coordinate system, the surgical instrument (a puncture needle for instance) is localized and its position is visualized with respect to the patient organs which are not directly visible. This approach is very similar to the GPS paradigm. Traditionally, three orthogonal slices in the patient data are presented on a distant screen. Sometimes a 3D representation is also added. In this study we evaluated the potential of adding a smart phone as a man-machine interaction device. Different experiments involving operators puncturing a phantom are reported in this paper.