Augmented and Virtual Reality Laboratory (AVR Lab)
AR/VR in Medicine
An augmented reality platform for medical planning
Researching in new technologies for diagnosis, planning and medical treatment have allowed the development of computer tools that provide new ways of representing data obtained from routine imaging studies. Laboratory studies, such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have become the standard for med- ical diagnosis, so today they are used to give a first diagnosis of the treatment to be followed depending on the patient’s condition. Also, surgeons use these images to obtain information about the best way to reach certain structures within the human body before the surgery. In this sense, augmented reality (AR) technologies provide a new form of data representation by combining the common analysis using images and the ability to superimpose virtual representations of any structure of the human body on a view of the real world on real-time. In this paper, we describe the development of a generic computer platform based on aug- mented reality technology for surgical planning. To validate the system, we focused in two cases of study: navigation through aorta artery for mitral valve repair surgery and navigation through vascular structures in the brain for the treatment of cerebral aneurysms.