Publications within ArtekMed

Enabling collaborative telepresence in healthcare, especially surgical procedures, presents a critical challenge. The decompressive craniotomy procedure stands out as particularly complex and timesensitive. The current teleconsultation approach relies on 2D color cameras, often offering only a fixed view and limited visual capabilities between experts and surgeons. However, teleconsultation can be addressed with Mixed Reality and immersive technology to potentially enable a better consultation of the procedure. We conducted an extensive user study focusing on decompressive craniotomy to investigate the advantages and challenges of our 3D teleconsultation system compared to a 2D video-based consultation system...

Medical teleconsultation was among the initial use cases for early telepresence research projects since medical treatment often requires timely intervention by highly specialized experts. When remote medical experts support interventions, a holistic view of the surgical site can increase situation awareness and improve team communication. A possible solution is the concept of immersive telepresence, where remote users virtually join the operating theater that is transmitted based on a real-time reconstruction of the local site. Enabled by the availability of RGB-D sensors and sufficient computing capability, it becomes possible to capture such a site in real time using multiple stationary sensors...

Our world is full of cameras, whether they are installed in the environment or integrated into mobile devices such as mobile phones or head-mounted displays. Displaying external camera views in our egocentric view with a picture-in-picture approach allows us to understand their view; however, it would not allow us to correlate their viewpoint with our perceived reality. We introduce Projective Bisector Mirrors for visualizing a camera view comprehensibly in the egocentric view of an observer with the metaphor of a virtual mirror. Our concept projects the image of a capturing camera onto the bisecting plane between the capture and the observer camera. We present extensive mathematical descriptions of this novel paradigm for multi-view visualization, discuss the effects of tracking errors and provide concrete implementation for multiple exemplary use-cases.

When two or more users attempt to collaborate in the same space with Augmented Reality, they often encounter conflicting intentions regarding the occupation of the same working area and self-positioning around such without mutual interference. Augmented Reality is a powerful tool for communicating ideas and intentions during a co-assisting task that requires multi-disciplinary expertise. To relax the constraint of physical co-location, we propose the concept of Duplicated Reality, where a digital copy of a 3D region of interest of the users’ environment is reconstructed in real-time and visualized in-situ through an Augmented Reality user interface...

Immersive Virtual Reality can be a memorable medium for story-telling and artistic expression. However, taking snapshots of VR applications is commonly only possible by taking a two-dimensional screenshot on a tethered PC. We propose to capture 3D snapshots using the interaction technique World-In-Miniature (WiM) by using virtual RGB-D cameras to create three-dimensional snapshots that can be exported and viewed outside the application.
We further describe a novel interaction method to fine-tune the content shown inside the WiM with VR controllers. This project is open-source and can be accessed at https://github.com/kyuq/3DWiMSnapshot

A 3D Telepresence system allows users to interact with each other in a virtual, mixed, or augmented reality (VR, MR, AR) environment, creating a shared space for collaboration and communication. There are two main methods for representing users within these 3D environments. Users can be represented either as point cloud reconstruction-based avatars that resemble a physical user or as virtual character-based avatars controlled by tracking the users' body motion. This work compares both techniques to identify the differences between user representations...

Current teleconsultation solutions for preclinical emergencies can transmit knowledge from a remote expert to a local paramedic using audio and 2D video channels. Such technology lacks precision and efficiency for medical diagnostic tasks, and visual feedback is often missing between participants. We investigate a mixed reality 3D teleconsultation solution for preclinical use,...

Intensive care units (ICUs) that host patients infected with COVID-19 through the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus are typically separated from other care units in the hospital. In typical ICU ward rounds, a number of multidisciplinary experts from different medical areas and expertise levels are present to discuss the situation and care of the patient. However, this procedure is contrasting the current COVID-19 recommendations regarding contact and personnel traffic. In this project, we demonstrate a system for mixed reality (MR) teleconsultation to support ICU wards (RTKMD)...

When users create hand-drawn annotations in Virtual Reality they often reach their physical limits in terms of precision, especially if the region to be annotated is small. One intuitive solution employs magnification beyond natural scale. However, scaling the whole environment results in wrong assumptions about the coherence between physical and virtual space. In this paper, we introduce Magnoramas, a novel interaction method for selecting and extracting a region of interest that the user can subsequently scale and transform inside the virtual space...

 

Due to demographic changes, a lack of medical expertise in special and rare cases may occur. One possible solution to overcome this deciency is the use of a teleconsultation system. This system makes it possible to remotely connect a medical expert. New technology developments, like AR- technologies, enable advanced and new applications of those systems. The present paper describes the results of expert interviews regarding attitudes towards and requirements on an AR-based teleconsultation system for telemedicine...