Augmented Reality Patient-Specific Registration for Medical Visualization

In recent years, medical research has made extensive use of Augmented Reality (AR) for visualization. These visualizations provide improved 3D understanding and depth perception for surgeons and medical staff during surgical planning, medical training, and procedures. Often, AR in medicine involves impractical and extensive instrumentation in order to provide the precision needed for clinical use. We propose a mobile AR 3D model registration system for use in a practical, non-instrumented hospital setting. Our registration system takes as input a patient-specific model and overlays it on the patient using an accurate pose registration technique that requires a single marker as a point of reference to initialize a point cloud-based pose refinement technique. Our method is automatic, easy to use, and runs in real-time on a mobile phone. We conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis of the registration. The results confirm that our AR pose registration system produces an accurate and visually correct overlay of the medical data in real-time.