Augmented Reality for Computer-Guided Interventions

With the development of augmented reality devices, new imaging hardware, and better computer simulations, the field of computer-assisted surgery is rapidly evolving. From an augmented visualization of medical images during an intervention to a fully automatic fusion of the patient’s virtual anatomy with the surgical view, many ways of augmenting a surgery can be envisioned. This chapter provides a description of the main challenges, state of the art, and results in this revolutionary area by looking at the contributions of augmented reality in several medical application fields with an emphasis on deformable techniques. We will address several key questions, such as the creation of patient-specific models of the anatomy, the registration of the virtual model onto the actual view, or the real-time computation of biophysical phenomena on this anatomy.