Oblique-viewing Endoscopic Navigation System with Simultaneous Display of Virtual and Real Endoscopic Images

摘要

Endoscopic surgery is becoming common as a minimally invasive procedure in recent years. In case of using rigid scopes, the motion of the endscope can be tracked using a 3D-position sensor attached to the endoscope body outside the cavity. Since endoscopic surgery is essentially monitor-based surgery, conventional monitor-based augmented reality (AR) technologies are straightforwardly applied without any special display devises or 3D glasses by combining rigid scope tracking. However, AR system for oblique-viewing endoscopic (oblique scope) has not been developed yet although it is widely used and even essential for laparoscopy, arthroscopy, sinus endoscopy, and so on. The viewing direction of an oblique scope is changeable by rotating the scope cylinder around the cylinder axis. In this paper, we describe an oblique scope AR navigation system by combining a rotary encoder to measure the scope cylinder rotation. We show preliminary experimental results using a phantom.