Touch-less medical image manipulation
By: Alexandre Campos & Fernando Nabais
From: Hospital Santa Maria & Ydreams
At: Instituto de Investigação Interdisciplinar, Anfiteatro
[2012-12-18]
In recent years, hospitals and clinics stopped developing films from MRI and CT scans. Today the standard procedure is to burn a CD with the entire exam in order to present this to the physicians. The CD’s have their own DICOM viewer software’s that are designed for reviewing purposes with the requisites of radiologists. In this new digital era, DICOM viewers became almost as diverse as clinics that make the exams but lacking the specifications needed in an operating room. They rely on a user interface that depends on mouse and keyboard which aren’t practical when surgeons are in a sterile dressing. Besides, they present single images or sequences of images from the same series with standard arrangements, not letting the surgeon choose which images from the different series they want to see. Compared to films that include the entire exam, this paradigm represents a huge downgrade in the way images are available in the operating room.
We developed a DICOM viewer optimized for Neurosurgeons with a touch-less interface that facilitates the way they interact with the viewer during the surgery. This digital scope was built over the ClearCanvas® DICOM render engine using a depth sensing camera that, together with proprietary computer vision algorithms, allows to track the user movements in the air.
This viewer can optimize the way different pictures from different sequences or modalities are organized and, with the help of the gesture based interface, the surgeon can interact changing sequences, zooming, windowing, etc. while performing his surgery and without having to change or scrub again.