Managing the Complexity of the User Interface of a MRI Guided Surgery System

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) guided procedures is an emerging field of image guided surgery (IGS). Interventional radiologists have specialised in image guided procedures that require the most intensive usage of imaging, therefore interactivity of the system is an important issue. Often slow image update rate of MRI is seen as a major reason for the system latency. The development of new faster imaging sequences does not provide the desired speedup, since significant latency is introduced by the user interaction mechanisms of the current systems. Our challenge was to design a user interface that enables the radiologists to control the system without compromising the power of MRI. This paper presents an analysis of the application and describes the user centered design and implementation of the system.