Integrated Medical Workflow for Augmented Reality Applications

International Workshop on Augmented environments for Medical Imaging and Computer-aided Surgery (AMI-ARCS), Copenhagen, Denmark, October 2006

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) have the potential
to improve surgical interventions and image-guided therapy
by providing clinicians with interactive three-dimensional visualizations
in all phases of treatment. However, experimental AR research
applications typically focus on a single medical procedure
and do not attempt to cover the whole clinical workflow from preoperative
to intra-operative and post-operative support. In the scope
of the EU-funded Marie Curie research project ARIS*ER (Augmented
Reality in Surgery), we are investigating a more complete
workflow support with AR technology. This paper discusses a
component-oriented software architecture which specifically aims
at addressing the needs of medical AR, in particular strategies for
ensuring uniform application quality throughout the medical workflow.
We discuss the management of off-line and on-line image acquisition
methods and methods for consistent management of modeling,
processing and visualization of medical datasets throughout
the medical workflow. Finally, we present three different medical
application examples which illustrate the use of the framework.

PDF