Aims: The laparoscopy reduces the damage to body and shortens the postoperative recovery period, so it is becoming the standard surgical operation. However, the indirect method of observing and manipulating in laparoscopy impairs the surgeon's eye-hand coordination, which makes it difficult to carry out a laparoscopic operation successfully. Then we initiate the optical see-through technique in order to find solutions for these difficulties of laparoscopy. Methods: The floating display mechanism of optical see-through technique is proposed and deeply researched to overcome the mislo-cation of camera picture and the misorientation of instrument movements. The line-of-sight of endoscope is transformed and coincides with the surgeon's natural line-of-sight. The pictures of endoscope are projected onto the semi-transparent mirror between the surgeon's eyes and the abdomen, and the pre-operative information from X-ray, ultrasound or MRI images are also mapped onto the endoscope camera pictures, which gives the surgeon the visual sense of seeing through the skin. An experimental optical see-through system is constructed. Results: Extensive experiments are conducted on phantoms to verify the accuracy and stability of the constructed system. Experimental results show that the optical see-through system has better performance and overcomes the eye-hand coordination problem. Conclusions: The optical see-through system shows its superiority in laparoscopy, and has a broad application prospect in the future. We will develop its new functions for other kinds of surgeries such as arthroscopy. Its disadvantages such as complex calibration procedure have to be resolved in the future.
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