AN AUGMENTED REALITY-BASED PLATFORM FOR USERS’ TRAINING AND PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT FOR NEUROSURGICAL TARGETING TASKS

Purpose:
Neurosurgical interventions require preoperative planning and precise navigation and manipulation of medical instruments since the workspace involves healthy brain tissues and eloquent brain structures. Computer-assisted surgery research is gaining more interest in medical disciplines such as neurosurgery. Visualization and rendering of 3D medical volumes to assess patients’ case is a major challenge. In this work, we propose an augmented reality (AR) simulator module when training novice trainees for targeting tasks using the best trajectory, as part of a neurosurgical procedure.

Methods:
The proposed module to augmented reality visualization depends on the integration of new technology (Unity3D, Vuforia SDK) to create AR applications for preoperative neurosurgical planning and training based on fiducial markers. Fourteen novice participants were asked to participate in an experiment to evaluate and demonstrate the module’s validity. Through performing targeting tasks with a variety of targets, participants’ accuracy and time were recorded for an analysis of their performance.

Results:
Participants performance and tasks time were measured. Initial results show an improvement in terms of accuracy and time for the participants targeting tasks with the aid of AR visualization.

Conclusion:
The current module prototype had the potential to help novice trainees maintain planning and perform targeting task skills with objective measures of speed and accuracy..