Today surgery microscopes are the gold-standard in microsurgery applications such as ophthalmic, neurosurgery, otorhinolaryngology, gynecology, plastic surgery and recently in dentistry. Even though the state-of-the-art optomechanical technology is robust, reliable surgical visualization systems still have a number of limitations according to usability requirements and the need for interpretation into a future fully-digital visualization workflow. For example, it is nearly impossible that more than two observer views can be realized in a currently available commercial surgery microscope. Furthermore, multi-observer positions are mostly not independed from each other requesting the same image quality as in a single-observer case. A state-of-the-art microscope allows only an overlay of pre-recorded patient data over the current surgery scene. Therefore, a real time data fusion is not achieved. Those are only a few limitations on presently available surgery microscopes.
To reduce the above-mentioned limitations, an experimental fully digital surgery microscope will be developed at Institute of Biomedical Engineering. Fully digital means that the visualization for imaging comes now from a fully rendered 3D model, which will be reconstructed from the surgery scene by using a multi-camera setup. The complete setup is divided into several parts: the optical recording system, the illumination system, the algorithm for 3D reconstruction, and multi-observer visualization.
In the first step a real time system architecture would be developed that allows a physician based on an augmented or virtual reality to work safely. Therefor appropriate methods must be developed for the segmentation and transformation. This methods must also implemented and verify in an optimized soft- and hardware architecture. By choosing the methods a special attention must be focused on safety, readability und robustness for medical devices.