Hongen Liao, PhD

Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University

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Innovation of Three-dimensional Visualization Techniques for Minimally Invasive Surgery

There have been significant advances in the field of minimally invasive and non-invasive surgeries. Rapid technical advances in medical imaging, including its growing application in therapy and invasive/interventional procedures, have attracted significant interest in the close integration of research in medicine, life sciences, physical sciences, and engineering. Image-guided surgery is a general term used for any surgical procedure with indirect visualization to realize the minimally invasive operation. The use of diagnostic images as a means of navigating during surgery, in combination with the use of a positional tracking device, has been a focus of interest following advances in medical imaging and computer technology. Most of the medical image used for the surgical navigation system is displayed as a set of two-dimensional sectional images or computer generated three-dimensional (3-D) models and often placed in a nonsterile field from surgeon. This forces the surgeon to take extra steps to reconstruct the 3-D information of the object in their mind and match the guidance information on the display with the actual anatomy of the patient. One interesting field of medical image visualization technology is naked-eye stereoscopy. Here we introduce a novel medical autostereoscopic image named Integral Videography (IV). The IV technique can provide geometrically accurate 3D images and reproduces motion parallax without using any supplementary viewing devices or tracking devices. Using IV, the 3-D image can be observed from a wide area in front of the display by several viewers at once. The development of relative image overlay techniques makes it appear that the 3-D image is inside the patient's body, and enables a medical augmented reality environment for minimally invasive surgery.