TeleSTAR

Motivation

Imaging with endoscopes or digital microscopes is changing medicine, and can also be used to teach surgeons. TeleSTAR takes advantage of the latest imaging technology for better training and visualisation of operations.

Goals and Motivation

TeleSTAR uses a full digital surgical microscope and augmented/mixed reality to provide new tools that permit teaching and intraoperative assistance. The system offers new ways to visualise relevant surgical information, allowing surgeons to improve, and also explain, their decisions. Surgical decisions can be easily visualised during course units, on high-resolution screens or a head-mounted display, in any local or remote location. The system guarantees the exact same surgeon’s field-of-view for all attending healthcare professionals. “Simple” standard procedures, as well as rare and complicated procedures, can be visually annotated and augmented – and supplemented with audio comments – to make every step of the surgery transparent. A bidirectional communication platform allows all attendees to address questions to the surgeon at the right time, which creates a dynamic teaching environment despite local distance. The teaching concept can be scaled to other surgical domains and existing degree programmes.

Publications

E. L. Wisotzky, J.-C. Rosenthal, P. Eisert, A. Hilsmann, F. Schmid, M. Bauer, A. Schneider, F. C. Uecker, Interactive and Multimodal-based Augmented Reality for Remote Assistance using a Digital Surgical Microscope, IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), Osaka, Japan, 2019

A. Schneider, M. Lanski, M. Bauer, E. L. Wisotzky, J.-C. Rosenthal, An AR-Solution for Education and Consultation during Microscopic Surgery, Proc. Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery (CARS), Rennes, France, 2019.