[POSTER] Visualizing In-Organ Tumors in Augmented Monocular Laparoscopy

One of the important goals of medical augmented reality is to reveal the hidden anatomy, such as a tumor in an organ. However, conveying a hidden tumor's depth to the user effortlessly and precisely is still an unsolved problem. This is especially difficult in monocular laparoscopy. First, the number of available depth cues is in practice limited to only two: occlusion and relative size. Second, exploiting these cues is not an easy task either. We propose a specific visualization consisting of auxiliary orthographic tumor silhouettes on the front and back surfaces of the organ and a semi-transparent tumor in between. This creates two depth planes forming a perceivable ratio-scaled metric space for the tumor. We conducted a user study to evaluate the proposed visualization. The results show that subsurface tumor depth perception is improved dramatically compared to the conventional transparent overlay.