Assisting Vascular Surgery with Smartphone Augmented Reality.

Area of Science:

• Medical Technology
• Surgical Navigation
• Augmented Reality

Background:

• Augmented reality-assisted surgery (ARAS) offers intraoperative guidance but lacks implementation in vascular surgery.
• Current smartphone AR platforms exhibit tracking instability, hindering precise surgical applications.
• Development of novel algorithms is crucial to overcome limitations in mobile AR for surgery.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an ARAS system using affordable smartphone hardware for vascular surgery.
• To evaluate the performance and tracking stability of the developed ARAS system.

Main Methods:

• Designed an ARAS system incorporating standard optical tracking (SOT).
• Developed a novel hybrid gyroscopic and optical tracking (HGOT) algorithm for enhanced stability.
• Evaluated tracking algorithm stability and calculated root mean square error (RMSE) using a phantom model.

Main Results:

• The ARAS system real-time fused a 3D guidance model with patient anatomy on a smartphone.
• HGOT demonstrated significantly superior rotational (0.091° vs 3.12°) and positional (0.03 mm vs 3.3 mm) tracking accuracy over SOT.
• HGOT tracking stability was significantly better than SOT (p = 0.004).

Conclusions:

• A novel augmented reality system for vascular procedures has been successfully developed.
• The hybrid gyroscopic and optical tracking (HGOT) algorithm substantially enhances the stability of low-cost, handheld AR solutions.