Hands-free augmented reality for vascular interventions.

During a vascular intervention (a type of minimally invasive surgical procedure), physicians maneuver catheters and wires through a patient's blood vessels to reach a desired location in the body. Since the relevant anatomy is typically not directly visible in these procedures, virtual reality and augmented reality systems have been developed to assist in 3D navigation. Because both of a physician's hands may already be occupied, we developed an augmented reality system supporting hands-free interaction techniques that use voice and head tracking to enable the physician to interact with 3D virtual content on a head-worn display while leaving both hands available intraoperatively. We demonstrate how a virtual 3D anatomical model can be rotated and scaled using small head rotations through first-order (rate) control, and can be rigidly coupled to the head for combined translation and rotation through zero-order control. This enables easy manipulation of a model while it stays close to the center of the physician's field of view.