Visual and haptic augmentation technologies for surgical navigation

Augmented Reality (AR) technologies have been applied in clinical applications, such as surgical navigation systems. Especially, visual augmentation has been pursued in the last decade. The visual-based AR surgical navigation visualizes a target object hidden behind other tissue to guide a surgeon to the target. However, the point-based registration still remains problems of estimating the target inside the body, mainly because of non-rigidity of a human body. We propose an anatomical fiducial line based registration method, which uses a vessel neighboring a target tissue as a fiducial to calculate the transformation matrix between two spaces. The result of experiments showed high robustness in estimating target positions. On the other hand, haptic-based AR surgical navigation helps the manipulation directly to avoid invasion of a surgical tool into the important anatomical areas, such as vessels and nerves. Foregoing studies developed a tactile display that generates tactile sensation on the stimulated area by the device. However, the devices disturb the surgeon's manipulation. We developed a spatially transparent tactile display, which generates tactile sensation on the fingertip without stimulating the fingertip itself. We developed a prototype system for haptic guidance and examined its performance.