Augmented reality for rhinoplasty: 3D scanning and projected AR for intraoperative planning validation

Rhinoplasty is one of the major surgical procedures most popular and it is generally performed modelling the internal bones and cartilage using a closed approach to reduce the damage of soft tissue, whose final shape is determined by means of their new settlement over the internal remodelled rigid structures. An optimal planning, achievable thanks to advanced acquisition of 3D images and thanks to the virtual simulation of the intervention via specific software. Anyway, the final result depends also on factors that cannot be totally predicted regarding the settlement of soft tissues on the rigid structures, and a final objective check would be useful to eventually perform some adjustments before to conclude the intervention. The main idea of the present work is the using of 3D scan to acquire directly in the surgical room the final shape of the nose and to show the surgeon the differences respect to the planning in an intuitive way using augmented reality (AR) to show false colours directly over the patient face. This work motivates the selection of the devices integrated in our system, both from a technical and an ergonomic point of view, whose global error, evaluated on an anthropomorphic phantom, is lower than ± 1.2 mm with a confidence interval of 95%, while the mean error in detecting depth thickness variations is 0.182 mm.