High-Quality See-Through Surgical Guidance System Using Enhanced 3-D Autostereoscopic Augmented Reality

Precise minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has significant advantages over traditional open surgery in clinic. Although pre-/intraoperative diagnosis images can provide necessary guidance for therapy, hand-eye discoordination occurs when guidance information is displayed away from the surgical area. In this study, we introduce a real three-dimensional (3-D) see-through guidance system for precision surgery.

To address the resolution and viewing angle limitation as well as the accuracy degradation problems of autostereoscopic 3-D display, we design a high quality and high accuracy 3-D integral videography (IV) medical image display method. Furthermore, a novel see-through microscopic device is proposed to assist surgeons with the superimposition of real 3-D guidance onto the surgical target is magnified by an optical visual magnifier module.

Spatial resolutions of 3-D IV image in different depths have been increased 50%∼70%, viewing angles of different image sizes have been increased 9%∼19% compared with conventional IV display methods. Average accuracy of real 3-D guidance superimposed on surgical target was 0.93 mm ± 0.41 mm. Preclinical studies demonstrated that our system could provide real 3-D perception of anatomic structures inside the patient's body.

The system showed potential clinical feasibility to provide intuitive and accurate in situ see-through guidance for microsurgery without restriction on observers' viewing position.

Our system can effectively improve the precision and reliability of surgical guidance. It will have wider applicability in surgical planning, microscopy, and other fields.