Augmented Visualization of the Patient's Organs through a SlidingWindow

Augmented Reality technology has the potential to bring the visual advantages of open surgery back to minimally invasive surgery increasing the physician’s visual knowledge with information gathered from patients’ medical images. In this paper is presented a medical Augmented Reality application which is able to guide the surgeon in the operating phase through the visualization of anatomical structures of interest with the aim to prevent erroneous disruption of some organs during surgical procedures. Since the simple augmentation of the real scene cannot provide information on the scene depth, the visualization of a sliding window is provided in order to allow the occlusion of part of the organs and to obtain a more realistic impression that the virtual organs are situated inside the patient’s body.