A training tool for clinicians in segmenting medical images to make 3D models.

Introduction: 3D models produced from medical imaging can be used to plan treatment, design prosthesis, teach and for communication. Despite the clinical benefit, few clinicians have experience of how 3D models are produced.This is the first study evaluating a training tool to teach clinicians to produce 3D models and reporting the perceived impact on their clinical practice.

Systematic review of techniques used to validate the registration of augmented-reality images using a head-mounted device to navigate surgery.

Augmented-reality (AR) head-mounted devices (HMD) allow the wearer to have digital images superposed on to their field of vision. They are being used to superpose annotations on to the surgical field akin to a navigation system. This review examines published validation studies on HMD-AR systems, their reported protocols, and outcomes.

Gesture Recognition in Robotic Surgery With Multimodal Attention.

Automatically recognising surgical gestures from surgical data is an important building block of automated activity recognition and analytics, technical skill assessment, intra-operative assistance and eventually robotic automation. The complexity of articulated instrument trajectories and the inherent variability due to surgical style and patient anatomy make analysis and fine-grained segmentation of surgical motion patterns from robot kinematics alone very difficult. Surgical video provides crucial information from the surgical site with context for the kinematic data and the interaction between the instruments and tissue.

An effective visualisation and registration system for image-guided robotic partial nephrectomy.

Robotic partial nephrectomy is presently the fastest-growing robotic surgical procedure, and in comparison to traditional techniques it offers reduced tissue trauma and likelihood of post-operative infection, while hastening recovery time and improving cosmesis. It is also an ideal candidate for image guidance technology since soft tissue deformation, while still present, is localised and less problematic compared to other surgical procedures. This work describes the implementation and ongoing development of an effective image guidance system that aims to address some of the remaining challenges in this area.

Interactive finite element simulation of the beating heart for image-guided robotic cardiac surgery.

An interactive finite element simulation of the beating heart is described in which the intrinsic motion is implied from preoperative 4D tomographic scan data. The equations of motion are reversed such that, given changes in node displacements over time, the node forces that produce those changes are recovered. Subsequently, these forces are resolved from the global coordinate system into systems local to each mesh element such that, at each simulation time step, the collection of node forces can be expressed as simple weighted sums of current node positions.