Laser pointer interaction for 3D angiography operation

A primary challenge for creating an interactive display in operating room (OR) is in the definition of control methods that are efficient and easy to learn for the physician. Apart from traditional input methods such as mouse and keyboard, we present a system that utilizes the laser pointer to manipulate directly the 3D medical images of angiography on LCD display. This work is based on laser detection, tracking the spot, and laser gesture recognition using an ordinary laser pointer. The laser spot is captured by a web camera and its location recognized with the help of the computer vision techniques. The system includes two moving operations to execute commands: ”circle gesture” with two directions and ”line gesture” with four directions. The recorded laser gestures are then recognized using two different algorithms: dynamic time wrapping (DTW) and one dollar (1$) recognizer. Our experiments show that the DTW algorithm performs better with an overall accuracy of %89.6 and is faster than the 1$ algorithm. This paper describes the proposed system, its implementation, and an experiment that is performed to evaluate it.