Collecting Relevant Environmental Parameters for Surgical Lighting Control

Abstract

During the surgery, the lighting unit often needs to be manually adapted. However, the manual manipulation may cause loss of concentration, loss of time and increased risk of infections. To improve the manipulation, a semi-automated lighting system commanded by the surgeon is suggested. The commands are given via a pointer device to indicate the desired location and orientation of the light beam. The pointer device is tracked in space with a low-cost infrared 6DOF real-time system based on Nintendo Wii-Remotes. In this study, the precision and accuracy of the tracking system was tested with static markers, dynamic markers and with the pointer device. Moreover, the wound reconstruction was evaluated. The results showed that the tracking system is sufficiently precise and repeatable. On the other hand, the position accuracy was lower than expectations, especially with the pointer device. It is concluded that the method of collecting relevant parameters with a pointer device using a low-cost tracking system is promising for the surgical lighting control application when a proper mapping of the system coordinates to the real world coordinates is achieved.