Training for Planning Tumour Resection: Augmented Reality and Human Factors

Abstract

Planning surgical interventions is a complex task, demanding a high degree of perceptual, cognitive, and sensorimotor skills to reduce intra- and post-operative complications. This process requires spatial reasoning to coordinate between the preoperatively acquired medical images and patient reference frames. In the case of neurosurgical interventions, traditional approaches to planning tend to focus on providing a means for visualizing medical images, but rarely support transformation between different spatial reference frames. Thus, surgeons often rely on their previous experience and intuition as their sole guide is to perform mental transformation. In case of junior residents, this may lead to longer operation times or increased chance of error under additional cognitive demands. In this paper, we introduce a mixed augmented-/virtual-reality system to facilitate training for planning a common neurosurgical procedure, brain tumour resection. The proposed system is designed and evaluated with human factors explicitly in mind, alleviating the difficulty of mental transformation. Our results indicate that, compared to conventional planning environments, the proposed system greatly improves the nonclinicians' performance, independent of the sensorimotor tasks performed ( ). Furthermore, the use of the proposed system by clinicians resulted in a significant reduction in time to perform clinically relevant tasks ( ). These results demonstrate the role of mixed-reality systems in assisting residents to develop necessary spatial reasoning skills needed for planning brain tumour resection, improving patient outcomes.

Immersive Technology for Medical Education: Technology Enhance Immersive Learning Experiences

“…It enhanced the efficiency of the operation. 30 In conclusion, applying immersive technology to medical science had 5 categories: treatment, education, rehabilitation, training, and surgery. This technology could create the virtual situation in different contexts.…”

Interface of mixed reality: from the past to the future

“…Using MR to plan surgical interventions can support transformation between different spatial reference frames while visualizing medical images. The system assists users to develop the necessary spatial reasoning skills needed for surgical planning and greatly improves the performance of non-clinicians and significant reduces the time on completing tasks for clinicians (Abhari et al 2015).…”

Visualization of Multimodal Brain Connectivity for Neurosurgical Planning Using Handheld Device Augmented Reality

“…Conventionally, surgeons are required to do cognitively demanding mental transformations to coordinate between preoperative two-dimensional (2D) patient-specific magnetic resonance images (MRI) and patient reference frames (i.e. three-dimensional, 3D, anatomy) [1]. Additionally, they need to adeptly manipulate instruments in the surgical field while looking at a 2D display of preoperative images [2].…”

“…This is particularly challenging in the case of junior trainees who may have limited previous surgical experience and less developed spatial and perceptual intuition. Ultimately, this leads to longer surgeries and increases the chance of error associated with reduced performance due to cognitive overload [1].…”