Medical Application of Virtual and Augmented Reality Tools. With the Virtual Reality tool SpectoVR, doctors can interact in a three-dimensional space with the patient data prior to surgery.
The planning of a surgical procedure is an essential part of successful treatment. To determine how best to carry out procedures and where to make an incision, surgeons need to obtain as realistic an image as possible of anatomical structures such as bones, blood vessels, tissues and of course the pathology. University of Basel researchers have now developed a technology that uses standard three-dimensional medical patient data set and enables visualizing them in real-time in a virtual environment.
The visualization tool is currently extended with automatic segmentation and cutting tools to more realistically prepare for the surgery.
This innovation is part of the MIRACLE project which has received funding amounting to CHF 15.2 million from the Werner Siemens Stiftung. The goal of the project is the development of a minimally invasive tool to cut bones with laser. As part of the lighthouse project at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, new opportunities for graphic calculations in real-time and virtual reality have been developed for the operating room. The Department of Biomedical Engineering was set up in the Switzerland Innovation Park Basel Area in 2015.