The proposed method exhibits sufficient accuracy and convenience for use in bone tumor resection. It also has favorable practical applicability due to its low cost and portability.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Augmented reality is popular in various fields, and the importance of this technology has been increasing. Its medical application has also been widely studied. Particularly, augmented reality can be a more promising technique of a surgery which requires great precision. This paper introduces an overview of augmented reality and reviews the recent applications in medicine. After describing the basic concepts, brief characteristics of the three components that comprise augmented reality are provided. Various applications implemented in the authors' laboratory are reviewed.
BackgroundIn longitudinal electroencephalography (EEG) studies, repeatable electrode positioning is essential for reliable EEG assessment. Conventional methods use anatomical landmarks as fiducial locations for the electrode placement. Since the landmarks are manually identified, the EEG assessment is inevitably unreliable because of individual variations among the subjects and the examiners. To overcome this unreliability, an augmented reality (AR) visualization-based electrode guidance system was proposed.MethodsThe proposed electrode guidance system is based on AR visualization to replace the manual electrode positioning. After scanning and registration of the facial surface of a subject by an RGB-D camera, the AR of the initial electrode positions as reference positions is overlapped with the current electrode positions in real time. Thus, it can guide the position of the subsequently placed electrodes with high repeatability.ResultsThe experimental results with the phantom show that the repeatability of the electrode positioning was improved compared to that of the conventional 10–20 positioning system.ConclusionThe proposed AR guidance system improves the electrode positioning performance with a cost-effective system, which uses only RGB-D camera. This system can be used as an alternative to the international 10–20 system.
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