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Anatomy education is a challenging but vital element in forming future medical professionals. In this work, a personalized and interactive augmented reality system is developed to facilitate education. This system behaves as a "magic mirror" which allows personalized in-situ visualization of anatomy on the user's body. Real-time volume visualization of a CT dataset creates the illusion that the user can look inside their body. The system comprises a RGB-D sensor as a real-time tracking device to detect the user moving in front of a display. In addition, the magic mirror system shows text information, medical images, and 3D models of organs that the user can interact with. Through the participation of 7 clinicians and 72 students, two user studies were designed to respectively assess the precision and acceptability of the magic mirror system for education. The results of the first study demonstrated that the average precision of the augmented reality overlay on the user body was 0.96 cm, while the results of the second study indicate 86.1% approval for the educational value of the magic mirror, and 91.7% approval for the augmented reality capability of displaying organs in three dimensions. The usefulness of this unique type of personalized augmented reality technology has been demonstrated in this paper.

The proposed system proved to be efficient by improving the user engagement and exercise performance outcomes. The results also suggest that the use of biomechanical standards to recognize movements is valuable in guiding users during rehabilitation exercises.

Surgical flow disruptions affect surgeons' intra-operative workload. Increased mental workload was associated with inferior technical performance. Our simulation-based findings emphasize the need to establish smooth surgical flow which is characterized by a low level of process deviations and disruptions.

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Prostate brachytherapy is a treatment for prostate cancer using radioactive seeds that are permanently implanted in the prostate. The treatment success depends on adequate coverage of the target gland with a therapeutic dose, while sparing the surrounding tissue. Since seed implantation is performed under transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) imaging, intraoperative localization of the seeds in ultrasound can provide physicians with dynamic dose assessment and plan modification. However, since all seeds cannot be seen in the ultrasound images, registration between ultrasound and fluoroscopy is a practical solution for intraoperative dosimetry. In this manuscript, we introduce a new image-based nonrigid registration method that obviates the need for manual seed segmentation in TRUS images and compensates for the prostate displacement and deformation due to TRUS probe pressure. First, we filter the ultrasound images for subsequent registration using thresholding and Gaussian blurring. Second, a computationally efficient point-to-volume similarity metric, an affine transformation and an evolutionary optimizer are used in the registration loop. A phantom study showed final registration errors of 0.84 ± 0.45 mm compared to ground truth. In a study on data from 10 patients, the registration algorithm showed overall seed-to-seed errors of 1.7 ± 1.0 mm and 1.5 ± 0.9 mm for rigid and nonrigid registration methods, respectively, performed in approximately 30 seconds per patient.

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Fully automated registration between TRUS and the reconstructed seeds performed well in ground-truth phantom experiments and qualitative observation showed adequate performance on early clinical patient data.