Augmented Reality for Minimally Invasive Ear Surgery

Augmented reality allows surgeons to see through structures and access hidden information during surgery in a minimally invasive and immersive manner. Augmented reality can be applied in surgical planning, intraoperative imaging, surgical navigation and target structure localization. It can particularly be useful in highlighting critical structures, disease location, pathologies and risk regions in an intuitive manner.

At ImViA Laboratory, we are collaborating with ENT surgeons at CHU Dijon to deliver sub-millimetric information about middle and inner ear cleft structures during different surgical procedures such as cochlear implant surgery and transtympanic drug administration. Information about middle ear cleft structures is obtained from a preoperative CT-scan exam and overlayed onto the surgical video. For transmodiolar cochlear implant surgery, position of the modiolar axis obtained from preoperative CT-scan is provided onto the microscope camera image along with navigational cues. Augmented reality provides all information unified on a single view which significantly improves the ergonomics of the procedure over traditional image guided systems.

Alain Lalande, PhD
Laboratoire ImViA
Faculté de Médecine, Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté
7, Bld Jeanne d'Arc, BP 87900, 21079 Dijon, cedex, FRANCE
Tel: (33) 3 80 39 33 91
Alain.Lalande@u-bourgogne.fr 
Service de Spectroscopie-RMN
Hôpital d’Enfant - CHU de Dijon
1 Bld Jeanne d’Arc, BP 77908, 21079 Dijon Cedex, FRANCE
Tel : (33) 3 80 29 30 31 (poste 12065), Fax : (33) 3 80 29 36 80