Pointing in multi-disciplinary medical meetings

In this paper a field study of using laser-pointing during multi-disciplinary medical meetings is presented. The pointing behaviour adopted by radiologists and surgeons to communicate about and collaboratively analyse patient data such as CT images today is illustrated based on field observations of pre-operative meetings. In a field test, laser-pointers were introduced in pre-operative meetings. How the dialogue and gesturing changed compared to meetings where laser-pointers were not present were investigated. Results from our study show that the multi-disciplinary medical meetings are clearly affected by the introduction of laser-pointer devices and we believe that the participants would benefit from a future gesturing tool if it was carefully designed. The implementation of an application that provides touch feedback in three dimensions of the anatomical structure of blood vessels as well as tumours is described and related to our results.