Interactive Depth of Focus for Improved Depth Perception

The need to look into human body for better diagnosis, improved surgical planning and minimally invasive surgery led to breakthroughs in medical imaging. But, intra-operatively a surgeon needs to look at multi-modal imaging data on multiple displays and to fuse the multi-modal data in the context of the patient. This adds extra mental effort for the surgeon in an already high cognitive load surgery. The obvious solution to augment medical object in the context of patient suffers from inaccurate depth perception. In the past, some visualizations have addressed the issue of wrong depth perception, but not without interfering with the natural intuitive view of the surgeon. Therefore, in the current work an interactive depth of focus (DoF) blur method for AR is proposed. It mimics the naturally present DoF blur effect in a microscope. DoF blur forces the cue of accommodation and convergence to come into effect and holds potential to give near metric accuracy; its quality decreases with distance. This makes it suitable for microscopic neurosurgical applications with smaller working depth ranges.