Touch- and marker-free interaction with medical software

We describe a touch-free input device for a medical data display application based on a hand gesture recognition system. The system is divided into the soft- and hardware for gesture recognition and a control plug-in for the open source DICOM viewer OsiriX. OsiriX is an image processing software dedicated to display data sets produced by medical imaging equipment or confocal microscopy. Hand gestures and 3D hand positions are recognized using two webcams in stereo configuration attached to a MacOS computer in a tower-like housing. Gathered pictures are subsequently transformed into interface commands controlling the OsiriX display, thus replacing completely the use of the computer’s mouse.