Three-Dimensional Sonification for Image-Guided Surgery

Abstract

In neuronavigation and image-guided surgery, the clinician’s surgical instrument is tracked in relation to the patient’s anatomy. This way, they can be guided towards pre-planned target locations, like positions for burr holes, incision points for biopsy needles, or the center of a tumor for thermal ablation. In this paper, I present the initial results of an experiment that simulates a surgical scenario using a skull phantom. After 50 minutes of explanation and training, 24 participants were guided towards target locations by auditory, visual, and audiovisual clues. So far, the results show that all methods successfully guide the participants to the targets. The trajectory lengths, the needed time to find the targets as well as the precision seem to lie in a similar order of magnitude. When guided by sonification, trajectories tend to be longest and axis-by- axis-motions can be observed. Visual guidance seems to suffer from the missing depth of pseudo-3D graphics on a 2D screen. Audiovisual guidance leads to more micro-motions near the targets, compared to purely visual guidance. Further analysis will quantify the effectiveness of sonification as a three-dimensional guidance tool for surgery.

Open Your Ears and Take a Look: A State‐of‐the‐Art Report on the Integration of Sonification and Visualization

“…Besides the approaches to audiovisual data analysis described in the previous sections of this report, audiovisual monitoring interfaces play an integral role in various domains, including air traffic control [EBL*23], control rooms [SFLD22, HHG*12], anesthesia [AQH*21,RMS*22], neurology [LCS*28], dermoscopy [WRK*19], surgery [Zie23], network monitoring [Wor19a,AHvR*21], automotive [JDS15,XWX*22], to name a few.…”