EVD Surgical Guidance with Retro-Reflective Tool Tracking and Spatial Reconstruction using Head-Mounted Augmented Reality Device

Augmented Reality (AR) has been used to facilitate surgical guidance during External Ventricular Drain (EVD) surgery, reducing the risks of misplacement in manual operations. During this procedure, the key challenge is accurately estimating the spatial relationship between pre-operative images and actual patient anatomy in AR environment. This research proposes a novel framework utilizing Time of Flight (ToF) depth sensors integrated in commercially available AR Head Mounted Devices (HMD) for precise EVD surgical guidance. As previous studies have proven depth errors for ToF sensors, we first assessed their properties on AR-HMDs. Subsequently, a depth error model and patient-specific parameter identification method are introduced for accurate surface information. A tracking pipeline combining retro-reflective markers and point clouds is then proposed for accurate head tracking. The head surface is reconstructed using depth data for spatial registration, avoiding fixing tracking targets rigidly on the patient's skull. Firstly, 7.580± 1.488 mm depth value error was revealed on human skin, indicating the significance of depth correction. Our results showed that the error was reduced by over 85% using proposed depth correction method on head phantoms in different materials. Meanwhile, the head surface reconstructed with corrected depth data achieved sub-millimetre accuracy. An experiment on sheep head revealed 0.79 mm reconstruction error. Furthermore, a user study was conducted for the performance in simulated EVD surgery, where five surgeons performed nine k-wire injections on a head phantom with virtual guidance. Results of this study revealed 2.09 ± 0.16 mm translational accuracy and 2.97± 0.91 degree orientational accuracy.