Eye Tracking meets Augmented Reality in Surgery
Eye tracking research of pd|z plays a key role in new HMZ flagship project SURGENT.
University Medicine Zurich just unveiled its new flagship project for 2018: SURGENT (Surgeon Enhancing Technologies). The project aims to set new standards in precision surgery. Under the auspices of the project, new technologies to improve surgical skills, initially in spinal and brain surgery, will be developed and clinically tested.
Researchers from different disciplines from the University of Zurich, ETH Zurich and the University’s hospitals will collaborate on the project. The project will be led by Mazda Farshad, director of Balgrist University Hospital, and Mirko Meboldt of pd|z.
One central goal of SURGENT is to use augmented reality (AR) to efficiently and effectively support navigation during an operation. To achieve this goal, researchers from pd|z will use eye tracking to analyze the surgeons’ interaction with both the physical and the virtual world. By application of new machine learning algorithms, eye tracking data will be processed in real-time, which allows to analyze surgeons’ behavior directly during operation in order to provide them with the right information at the right time.