Introducing Augmented Reality to Optical Coherence Tomography in Ophthalmic Microsurgery

In ophthalmic microscopic surgery, the introduction of new surgical microscopes equipped with Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) enables the surgeons to perform intraoperative multimodal (optical and OCT) imaging. The video demonstrates our proposed medical Augmented Reality (AR) solution to the long-known problem of determining the distance between the surgical instrument tip and the underlying tissue in ophthalmic surgery to further pave the way of AR into the surgical theater. Our method brings AR to OCT for the first time by augmenting the surgeon's view of the OCT images with an estimated instrument cross-section shape and distance to the retinal surface using only information from the shadow of the instrument in intraoperative OCT images.