Medical visualisation, augmented reality and anatomy training: an intuitive approach of visual arts and medicine

Medical visualisation has been an active area of research worldwide over the last two decades. Only recently, however, has technology reached a level of maturity and cost/performance ration that makes is deployment feasible on a large scale. In addition to providing scope to explore research in medical education, this opens a window of opportunity for ground-breaking research and product development that combines the underlying core technology with user-led know-how to deliver the solutions that today’s trainees demand. This paper presents a study into augmented-reality training environments and their application in postgraduate anatomy teaching an medical rehearsal. Interestingly, previous studies suggested that the interpretation of complex medical sciences often require a strong grasp of the related 3D anatomy. Furthermore there is a great interest expressed in the use of 3D applications, yet there has been little strategic application at the national level. To this end this paper elaborates a multidisciplinary attempt to explore anatomy education and the potential role of augmented reality in the medical sector. Our endeavour has focused primarily on five case studies exploring current approaches augmented with 3D visualisation and prototype human-computer interfaces. Notably the augmented reality and 3D visual representations do not intent to replace the existing teaching methods but to enhance them through a complementary approach. These tools have particular relevance in modern medical training where procedural techniques and specialist anatomy are effectively taught simultaneously in pressured clinical environments. Overall this paper elaborates the potential merging of various design, engineering an medical disciplines aiming to
facilitate human anatomy understanding in training and surgical rehearsal. Early results suggest that the integration of
robust anatomical modelling techniques, intuitive human-computer interfaces and current educational theory working synergistically can improve learning outcomes. Finally the paper offers a tentative plan of future work, which will
focus in the development of a standardised, reproducible, and robust platform for further training applications.