Innovative 3D augmented reality techniques for spinal surgery applications

This paper aims to be an outlet for speeding up workflow of orthopedics surgery and be helpful for surgeons to simply coordinate transformations between several imaging displays. Based on epipolar geometry and simple feature landmarks, a 3-D superimposed imaging approach is developed via the construction of the camera-projector system. The superimposed approach is to rectify the perspective, X-ray and projected image pair using the perspective projection model. The proposed method not only simplifies the computation between surgical instruments and patient for surgeons, but also reduces the radiation exposure. Experimental results for both the synthetic spinal image on dummy and real patient testing have demonstrated the feasibility of our approach.