Advanced Surgical Planning - Implant Recognition

Abstract

This paper originates from a student project in cooperation with ETH Zurich and CustomSurg and aims to support surgeons during complex bone fracture surgeries using HoloLens to detect, track and label implants. Modern technology contributes massively to 3D Vision. Therefore, deploying Microsoft HoloLens in surgeries is not far-fetched, although relatively novel. There are many possible applications, while CustomSurg provided us with the opportunity to detect their custom implants and set the groundwork for HoloLens application in surgery, which we approached with off-device computation. YOLOv5 deployed on a server communicates bidirectionally with HoloLens to send a captured image via TCP to the server, which processes the image and sends back information regarding the implant’s bounding box and the label. Bounding boxes were obtained using HoloLens spatial mapping and several coordinate transformations. Our model is trained on synthetic data generated in Unity and yields almost perfect results on synthetic images while slightly less accurate for real images due to domain gaps. This problem was addressed and tackled by manually adjusting the training data. Finally, Vuforia is used to compare our model to market solutions. It is also used to additionally track handheld implants which is not yet included in our data set but lacks robustness to sudden movements of the target object.