During neurovascular surgery, a surgeon must map preoperative patient images (e.g. vessels from angiographs) to the patient on the operating room table. This mapping helps the surgeon understand the topology and locations of the anatomy of interest that is not readily visible on the exposed surgical field. This type of spatial mapping is non-trivial; it is time consuming and may be prone to error. With augmented reality, the operating field of view is merged with preoperative patient data into a comprehensive visualization that facilitates the understanding of the topology and location of vessels with respect to the visible brain surface. This type of visualization has the potential to reduce surgical time and increase surgical precision. This presentation focuses on how to create effective augmented reality visualizations that can aid surgeons with specific surgical tasks and the use of the developed augmented reality image-guidance system in a series of clinical cases.
This talk will review:
Psychophysical studies to evaluate effective volumetric medical image visualization techniques
Augmented reality techniques for the surgical domain
Bringing new technology from lab to surgical theatre
Speaker Bio:
Marta Kersten-Oertel is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering and head of the Applied Perception Lab. Her research is focused on developing and evaluating new visualization and interaction techniques in the clinical domain. In particular, she is interested in improving the spatial and depth understanding of volume rendered medical data and studying the impact of augmented and virtual reality visualization to improve patient care. She received a BSc degree in Computer Science and a BA degree in Art History from Queen’s University (Kingston) in 2002. In 2005 she completed a MSc in Computer Science at Queen’s University and in 2015 her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at McGill University (Montreal). She has also worked as a research assistant in human-computer interaction and medical image processing at the University of Ottawa and the University of Tuebingen (Germany).