ENT Endoscopic Surgery and Mixed Reality
Minimally invasive otorhinolaryngology surgery uses a system that consists of an endoscope, microscope, high-resolution display, and several surgical tools to perform procedures of the Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) up to the upper Oesophagus. The complexity, and number of systems used, forces the surgeon to focus on multiple factors rather than exclusively on the procedure. This chapter focuses on the development of a system integrating the endoscopic feed with a Mixed Reality (MR) headset. For that, the visual data stream from an endoscopy system is integrated with an MR head-mounted device. An application was developed using Unity, Visual Studio, and Windows 10 SDK. The application also had the ability to access pre-operative images through its Graphical User Interface, and was integrated with the endoscopic feed wirelessly over a local area network. The application was tested in an educational abdominal phantom. The goal was to streamline the surgeon's focus more on the patient and to provide access to pre-operative images for in-procedure comparison at their fingertips.