Augmented Reality: From Video Games to Medical Clinical Practice
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EDITORIAL
Augmented Reality: From Video Games to Medical Clinical Practice Luigi Solbiati1,2
•
Nicolo’ Gennaro3 • Riccardo Muglia3
Received: 9 June 2020 / Accepted: 22 June 2020 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature and the Cardiovascular and Interventional Radiological Society of Europe (CIRSE) 2020
Over the last several years, spatial computing technology has allowed the development of simulated reality environments interacting with users. The first technology made available was virtual reality (VR) that completely immerses the user in an artificial, digitally created, three-dimensional (3D) world through head-mounted displays, with limited or no direct interaction between real world and the user. Such VR technology is increasingly used in many different fields, ranging from entertainment and gaming, to sports, to educational applications. In the medical field, it has applications for simulation of surgical procedures and training (e.g., viewing interventional procedures through stereoscopic viewers), but by itself cannot be employed to directly perform interventional procedures. Augmented reality (AR), the next technologic phase, overlays and merges digital content on the real world, enhancing reality with superimposed information in the user’s environment [1]. This can be achieved using projection-based devices (monitor screens), mobile-based devices (smartphones, tablets) or see-through head-mounted displays (goggles with cameras) [2]. Since its inception, AR has been applied to the very same fields as VR (entertainment, gaming), but with the additional important capability of augmenting the virtual landscape with information from the real world. In the medical field, AR has been initially employed to gather all the patients’ related information in a single environment usually appearing on the operator’s goggles. Subsequently, owing to the possibility of interacting with the 3D volume (gesture control), AR has been used to augment surgical procedures (most notably for neuro, vascular, orthopedic, plastic and urologic surgery) creating 3D anatomic volumes from MRI and CT scans or angiographic images that manually overlaps over patients lying on real operating fields [3]. Thus, the real advantage of AR lies in its capability to automatically superimpose the patient’s reconstructed 3D volume so that the physician wearing goggles can visualize the pathological target to be biopsied or treated in the exact position where it is located through the patient without the need for invasive cutting or manipulation. This represents a transition from pure visualization to guidance tool. This has been made possible by the development of segmentation algorithms that enable automatic achievement of the 3D reconstruction of the target lesion and surroundings to millimetric precision, and by the introduction of electromagnetic or optical (cameras and markers) tracking systems, computer vision algorithms which match 3D volumes and the real world and increasingly sophisticated AR devices (i.e., goggl
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