A System for Augmented Reality Guided Ventricular Puncture Using a HoloLens: Design, Implementation and Initial Evaluation [in press]

In the treatment of patients surgical assistance systems are becoming increasingly established worldwide. The idea is to provide the surgeon with suitable assistance at the right time during the ongoing surgical procedure. We propose a surgical assistance system that supports the surgeon during ventricular puncture by visualizing the target area using a Microsoft HoloLens TM . Preoperatively an individual patient head model is reconstructed from computer tomography (CT)-data and a marker is attached to the patient, which is tracked during the procedure. The visualized target region must be positioned as accurately as possible during the surgical procedure to provide safe guidance for the surgeon. To ensure this we register the marker system to the patient’s head by using an Iterative Closest Point (ICP) based surface matching algorithm. The presented system will be examined in detail with regard to the render performance of the HoloLens. Furthermore, a qualitative online analysis is performed. The results show that the Augmented Reality (AR)-headset can be successfully used to visualize medical data and that the patient can be successfully tracked at runtime.