A boost towards computer-assisted surgery

Unlike previous works that manually create virtual surgery environments, a Surgical Digital Twin (SDT) aims for a high-fidelity representation of all entities and interactions during surgery—patients, instruments, devices, and medical staff.

Figure: Digital photograph of a spinal surgery (left) and rendering of its digital twin (right) obtained using our proof of concept for surgery digitization.

During the course of our Innosuisse Flagship project PROFICIENCY, Jonas Hein et al. demonstrated the potential of SDT: Capturing a real surgery, optimizing education, training of surgical robots in an interactive virtual environments to practice surgical techniques as well as understand human anatomy without the need for expensive and scarce anatomical models. Additionally, SDT are ideal for operative performance assessment, quality control or automatic generation of surgery reports. Furthermore robots and ML-based applications can be trained before being deployed in the real world.

Their work addressed key challenges such as sensor reflections on glass and metal, 3D reconstruction of anatomy, and body pose estimation. This research provides the foundation for future advancements in automated methods for surgery digitization and the creation of SDTs.

Learn more about Creating a Digital Twin of Spinal Surgery: A Proof of Concept