A novel mixed reality in breast and constructive jaw surgical tele-presence

Background and aim

Surgical telepresence has been implemented using Mixed reality (MR) but, MR is theory based and only used for investigating research. The Aim of this paper is to propose and implement a new solution by merging augmented video (generating in local site) and virtual expertise surgeon hand (remote site). This system is to improve the visualization of surgical area, overlay accuracy in the merged video without having any discoloured patterns on hand, smudging artefacts on surgeon hand boundary and occluded areas of surgical area.

Methodology

The Proposed system consists of an Enhanced Multi-Layer Mean Value Cloning (EMLMV) algorithm that improves the overlay accuracy, visualization accuracy and the processing time. This proposed algorithm includes trimap and alpha matting as a pre-processing stage of merging process, which helps to remove the smudging and discoloured artefacts surrounded by remote surgeon hand.

Results

Results showing that the proposed system improved the accuracy by reducing the overlay error of merging image from 1.3 mm (Millimeter) to 0.9 mm. Furthermore, it improves the visibility of surgeon hand in the final merged image from 98.4% (visibility of pixels) to 99.1% (visibility of pixels). Similarly, the processing time in our proposed solution is reduced, which is computed as 10 s to produce 50 frames, whilst, the state of art solution computes 11 s for the same number of frames.

Conclusion

The proposed system focuses on the merging of augmented reality video (local site), and the virtual reality video (remote site) with the accurate visualization. we consider discoloured areas, smudging artefacts and occlusion as the main aspects to improve the accuracy of merged video in terms of overlay error and visualization error. So, the proposed system would produce the merged video with the removal of artefacts around the expert surgeon hand.