ABSTRACT
AR techniques, which have been widely applied in MIS, provide surgeons with merged surgical scene and navigation information to improve eye-hand coordination. Among various AR techniques, the IV-based, 3D AR technique can present intuitive “see-through” scenes, with its full parallax, continuous viewing points, autostereoscopic displayed images, and simple implementation. To overcome the limitations of the resolution and the viewing angle, an enhanced IV-based, 3D AR technique is proposed for application in microsurgery. Besides the real-time 3D image rendering according to the configuration of an IV-based, 3D AR system, marker- or markerless-based patient-3D image registration techniques are critical to obtain a precise fusion of the virtual and real images. Moreover, automatic tracking of patient motion in real time resolves the patient-3D image mismatching problem, while spatial tracking of dedicated surgical tools within a compact volume can be employed in surgical planning, thus enhancing the system’s application in surgery. By referring to accurately registered 3D AR information, the surgeon can employ intuitive visualization to perform brain tumor surgery, oral maxillofacial surgery, orthopedic surgery, etc. This chapter also discusses the further development of 3D, AR-based surgical navigation and intervention.
