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Medical Augmented Reality: coming soon to (operating) theaters near you | Nassir Navab | TEDxTUM


at some point lost someone to medical

errors the movie industry lost one of

their greatest director Abbas Kiarostami

that I was raised by his amazing movies

during during the last 20 30 years and

we lost him quite young to medical

errors on the other side many of us have

seen fruit of excellence medicine

excellence medical practice I personally

tried you know experience it my dad had

in 86 a bypass than an hour tikka stent

in 98 the carotid artery repair in 2008

and pacemaker in 2012 so basically

science and medicine and good

performances extended his life and he is

blessing to us and to his big family for

over 25 years

surgical performance affects our life

and the lives of our you know loved one

but what is this performance how can we

improve this performance so basically

this performance is complicated I mean I

usually tell my students you know a

surgeon who cuts well and sutures well

is not really the definition of surgery

you don’t need 30 years of acquiring

knowledge and education and many years

of hands-on experience to cut and suture

the performance is about information

analysis of tests information making

decisions and then doing the action and

this is in surgery this is a very

dynamic process now about 100 years ago

or about 120 years ago doctors had no

imaging so what would how do they how

did they decide about their patient

so as we say but I do know the engineers

they would look at patients as a black

box like a device that you get so the

only way they could analyze that was to

looking at all the input/output so

that’s where they could look what is the

input output of this system looked

through this input output eventually

make observation of that that black box

that they wanted to know what’s going

wrong inside it taking looking at the

symptoms measuring signals coming from

that closed system eventually taking

some samples blood sample urine or

saliva or maybe going more invasively

doing a biopsy and trying to get samples

of this system in the you know in the

extreme case even opened the patient to

see what’s wrong which was happening in

end of 19th century in the last century

thanks to a lot of development in

imaging starting from home can

Hounsfield all the way to mansfield we

went from not having imaging to have

x-ray CT ultrasound M or Pet PET CT so

we started to have a lot of imaging and

a lot of information and also to have

computational power to visualize that

however the majority of this information

was mostly displayed on you know on

monitors on this place so the best

doctor of medicine experts radiologists

or even surgeons they were looking at

this display to analyze this data and

make their mental model of what’s going

wrong in inside the surgery room this

was even more complicated because they

had to interact with this data and if

the data is far away on a screen even

interacting with it becomes very complex

so about ten years ago we took our team

with our head mounted display

with our surgical partners and we went

to Berlin in an orthopedic conference

and we showed to hundreds of surgeons

that they in fact tacks to this

augmented reality or medical augmented

reality they could see the CT data the

data of the patient directly on top of

the Anatoly they could take a wireless

mouse interact with that data instead of

seeing an extra shot or a CT on a screen

they could actually directly see it on

the patient and analyze it directly on

the patient they could they could have

volume rendering thanks Nick

they were very very excited we we wanted

to bring this further to bring it into

procedures into surgeries so how do we

bring this augmented reality into the

operating room the first augmented

reality system we went which went on

many many operating room was thanks to a

startup company of two of my PhD

students and the surgical company which

allowed many processes such as sentinel

lymph node biopsies to be able to see

actually the nodules in augmented

reality and also in virtual reality but

why did we need this visual neonatal

window on the side because that

materiality was very nice was showing

them where these nodules are but to get

a 3d distance 3d perception doing

interaction with that data they still

needed this additional visual reality

display the reason is augmented reality

is not only about 3d image overlay 3d

image overlay is a very very little part

of the augmented reality if we want to

be augmented humans we want to see

beyond the wavelengths that our eyes can

see we want to hear

beyond the frequencies that are

system can absorb or analyze but still

do you know if I take the X er if I take

the city is still I have to bring it to

this limited bandwidth that humans can

see and this transfer is not easy if I

only argument the 3d even in the stereo

on top of the feet you see it floating

your brain says this is floating this is

not integrated so what we know at that

point tried to do is to use human

perception and the cues we are using

every day to actually fool the system

and improve our perception to use the

human cues of perception and make the

human believe that the human is really

seeing 3d inside that patient so now

this little tricks of computational

salesmen mathematics the same data now

you feel much more integrated as we are

looking we are using a few cues one of

them is parallax when I move I see more

I can see different positions I can’t

see more information that allows me to

believe that that Anatomy is behind the

surface but I still keep the ghosts of

the high curvature information on the

surface because if I remove that I lose

the shape of the of the Anatomy we also

use the fact that if I look directly

into the window I have to see through it

if I look on the side I see less so we

start to go you know instead of looking

at the cadaver and sovereign pose the

city that I see completely floating we

can go to a more complex visualization

this is the same CT data that now we are

looking through meta cues of perception

of human and now you start getting

confused what is real what is virtual

because now we are using if you see the

lines on the surface and continuing

while

feel that you’re saying inside the

anatomy how could we enforce this

coexistence of real and virtual so how

can I work with real tools in a virtual

environment and can now you know go

towards a direction where I cannot

perceive them or separate them from each

other so this is Felix one of our master

student a few years ago working with

Christopher Kristoff

Vishal Meyer he is looking with a tool

and now what you see here is the shadow

of the tool it’s following both on real

and virtual so as he’s moving this

shadow doesn’t exist this is a virtual

shadow but you see it both in real and

virtual so your brain starts to feel

that all this belongs to one environment

so your brain starts to put everything

into one shape now if I have

argumentation how do I explore the 3d

usually when you have a 3d data you move

it around and get all kinds of

perception about full 3d shape of the

object you have in front of you now if I

am in an argumentative situation when I

have the patient in front in front of me

and I see the anatomy of the patient I

can’t ask the doctor if I move it I lose

the alignment and of course I can’t ask

the surgeon to go under the table to see

the other side so we got inspired

but what dentists do we took a virtual

handheld tangible mirror and we brought

it inside this augmented reality view

which means now I can have my

augmentation but I can create any

impossible view and therefore I can

interact with that data so now I have an

augmentation but I can look at any of

you I am interested inside that patient

now one of the challenging point real

challenging point when you want to bring

the solution such complex solutions

operating room is how to integrate it

into the workflow and how to make sure

that you are showing the relevant

information if I show everything suffer

imposed it may not be useful you have to

show the relevant information at the

right time so many years ago we

developed this system where the x-ray

system and the camera system were

attached thanks to mirror system x-ray

and optics always had the same view so

the advantage was that when we were

going to the surgery and actually we

went to 40 trauma surgery in the center

of the Munich thanks to incredible

surgeons too so you could you could

position the patient for the first time

you could take an x-ray stop the x-ray I

want to use minimum x-ray

so you take one x-ray you stop it and

now you can start working under the

optic but you can see through the

patient and about 40 patient used for 40

patients this system was used quite

successfully now this is nice

I see the x-ray I see my hand I can go

through it and I can reduce the number

of x-ray from 40 to about 2 or 3 and

improve the surgery but now the question

is that this material is seen is very

crowded so we started to bring in

machine learning

how does machine learning play a role

here we have to learn we have to

understand what the doctor needs to see

at each moment from each modality if I

have x-ray optics in this case or if I

have PET CT M or etc during the surgery

the surgeon needs to see the relevant

information only so what we started was

a very simple machine learning system we

sell the system that I want to come

combined x-ray on optics but I want you

the system to automatically

recognize which element is in the scene

in optics and x-ray view and to

automatically decide how the blending

should happen to give me the optimized

view so instead of what we were showing

on the left-hand side now the system

automatically shows what is on the

right-hand side so it says if I have a

knife I want to see it I don’t want the

x-ray on my visualization on my hand I

am interested in the x-ray of internal

anatomy but I don’t want it to reduce my

performance by making it overloaded so

now at each pixel of the optics and

x-ray the system is deciding

automatically what that pixel is

information is and how it should be

merged into virtual and real the last

part is how to create this for the next

generation how to prepare the next

generation you know we have this

acceptance issue but we also now we want

this to come to our everyday life so we

started to work on augmented reality

also for education and for patient and

public information for our last few

years and actually I brought a system

here that after my talk you can try it

so basically the system allows you to to

get in front of the system and then the

system sees to rule you so basically the

system is going to recognize me and then

it starts to augment my body so with the

left hand I can show different part of

anatomy and focus on different anatomy

of my body with the right hand I can

increase the amount of information go

from simple balls to vasculature to

arteries and vein to internal anatomy

and finally to muscles and then I can

see the system with and then I can

analyze it we brought this to many

places to many schools

can turn it off if you want it was very

intuitive so we brought it to Essen and

about 2000 people played with the system

they were children they were adult and

all of them well right away started to

play around with their own body look at

different part of their body play and

try to understand what’s going on and

the signal was so simple the system was

so easy to handle that not only children

and adult but also politicians could

vote with it so you can imagine that the

system was extremely simple now the main

idea the main message I have here is if

we go for you know in the last century

imaging come in and radiation therapy

departments nuclear medicine Department

radiology departments they had to bring

physicists into their departments to

help them take advantage of radiation

therapy take advantage of you know pet

em or CT etc and our generation or

community or society now needs to have

computational scientists at the heart of

hospital it’s not acceptable that we can

on my mobile phone we can get all the

information that we need in a matter at

our fingertip and our surgeon the

surgeon who is doing the surgery on us

cannot get the information needs to

improve its performance right in front

of him thank you [Applause]

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