A Mixed Reality Tool for Orthopedic Preoperative Planning Support

Traditional preoperative planning can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. Reviewing static models often falls short of providing surgeons with the necessary spatial awareness and depth perception crucial for complex procedures. Mixed Reality (MR) technology can assist and support surgical planning by overcoming the limitations of traditional methods and offering significant benefits. These benefits include improved visualization and collaboration for surgeons, which can ultimately lead to better patient outcomes. The aim of the work is to develop a solution to support preoperative planning procedures for bone interventions that aims to create a dynamic virtual space for healthcare professionals to improve analysis and collaboration. For this purpose, we intend to utilize immersive technologies to translate surgical plans for orthopedic surgery, allowing digital holographic content to be projected onto the user’s field of view while still enabling them to see and interact with the real world. With Extended Reality (XR) technologies support, in this case holographic devices like HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap 2, by leveraging their features, we can create an immersive and interactive remote experience between users, improving orthopedic preoperative processes. The article describes the workflow employed to develop a surgical planning review prototype with the main 3D visualization and interaction functionalities being implemented. This will undergo usability testing to get users feedback of the solution to verify overall functionalities usability and to allow the improvement of the current solution.