Towards virtual displays in the interventional radiology suite: a feasibility study

Interventional Radiology (IR) is a rapidly advancing field, with complex procedures and techniques being developed at increasingly high rates. As these procedures and the underlying imaging technology continue to evolve, one of the challenges for physicians lies in maintaining optimal visualization of the various displays used to guide the procedure. Many Augmented Reality Surgical Navigation Systems (AR-SNS) have been proposed in the literature that aim to improve the way physicians visualize their patient’s anatomy, but there are few that address the problem of space within the IR suite. Our solution is the incorporation of an Augmented Reality “cockpit”, which streams and renders image data inside virtual displays visualized within the Hololens two, eliminating the need for physical displays. The benefit of our approach is that sterile free interaction and customization can be performed using hand gestures and voice commands, and the physician can optimize the positioning of the display without the need to worry about physical interference from other equipment. For proof of concept, we performed a user study to validate the suitability of our approach in the context of liver tumor ablation procedures. We found there was no significant differences in insertion accuracy or time between the proposed approach and the traditional method. This indicates that visualization of US imaging using our approach is an adequate replacement to the traditional physical display and paves the way for the next iteration of the system, which is to quantify the benefits of our approach when used in multi-modality procedures.

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