Acquisition and Remote Transfer of Operative Field View During Open Surgery

Abstract

Telementoring in open surgery has emerged as an alternative to on-site teaching. To ensure effective communication between the mentee and the mentor, the view of surgical operations in the operating room needs to be shared remotely in real-time. This study is carried out to propose a multi-threaded system that takes input from multi-color/depth cameras, aligns and creates a single point cloud representing the operative field in three-dimension, transfers it over the network, and reconstructs it for visualization for mentors. The system's performance is measured in terms of execution time of each threaded unit, and latency for transfer of multi-color/depth data over the network. The achieved registration accuracy is benchmarked for multiple cameras. The results show the potential usage of the proposed system for near real-time telementoring during open surgeries.