by Pascal Fallavollita
NARVIS is one of two hospital labs of the Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures (CAMP), Technische Universität München, directed by Professor Nassir Navab. The laboratory is located at the Chirurgischen Klinik und Poliklinik – Innenstadt, München, which provides an interdisciplinary platform for medical augmented reality activities. Established in 2004, a strong collaboration between surgeons and computer scientists has been recognized which resulted in a large number of international publications on various fundamental and translational research projects. Currently, NARVIS’ main areas of research include medical augmented reality, visualization and medical simulation environments.
Medical augmented reality has gained research interest in recent years. As tracking and display technologies matured, our research efforts progressed towards usability for applications such as anatomy education, patient rehabilitation and visualization via the ‘magic mirror’ technology. Another successful system within the lab is the Camera Augmented Mobile C-arm. The device extends a standard mobile C-arm by a video camera and mirror construction allowing the multimodal registration and visualization of X-ray and video images intraoperatively. In 2010, it became the first ever-medical AR technology to be deployed inside the operating room worldwide, utilized on over 40 patients in various orthopedic surgeries. The technology helped significantly decrease radiation exposure and X-ray acquisitions during surgery.
Lastly, our research group is looking in designing optimal medical simulation environments to help train resident surgeons without harming real patients. Our simulator is capable of representing the entire surgical workflow including a medical imaging device simulation with the capacity to use patient-specific data, thus allowing the representation of a broad range of anatomical and pathological variety. We included real surgical tools and instruments that are augmented with realistic haptic feedback. Inherently, we also addressed a broad spectrum of human sensory channels such as tactile, auditory and visual channels in real-time. The readers are also invited to visit the NARVIS Lab website to get more information on aspects of our work. Applications for PhD and PostDoc positions at CAMP can be made here.
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Pascal Fallavollita, PhD is currently a senior research scientist at the Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures, and leading innovative research in computer assisted interventions, visualization and augmented reality at the Navigated Augmented Reality Visualization Systems (NARVIS) laboratory, in the Technical University of Munich, Germany.
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