Augmented reality (AR) techniques play an important role in the field of minimally invasive surgery for orthopedics. AR can improve the hand-eye coordination by providing surgeons with the merged surgical scene, which enables surgeons to perform surgical operations more easily. To display the navigation information in the AR scene, medical image processing and three-dimensional (3D) visualization of the important anatomical structures are required. As a promising 3D display technique, integral videography (IV) can produce an autostereoscopic image with full parallax and continuous viewing points. Moreover, IV-based 3D AR navigation technique is proposed to present intuitive scene and has been applied in orthopedics, including oral surgery and spine surgery. The accurate patient-image registration, as well as the real-time target tracking for surgical tools and the patient, can be achieved. This paper overviews IV-based AR navigation and the applications in orthopedics, discusses the infrastructure required for successful implementation of IV-based approaches, and outlines the challenges that must be overcome for IV-based AR navigation to advance further development.
Keywords: Augmented reality; Integral videography; Orthopedics; Three-dimensional visualization.