Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) devices such as the keyboard and the mouse are among the most contaminated regions in an operating room (OR). This paper proposes a sterile, intuitive HCI to navigate MRI images using freehand gestures. The system incorporates contextual cues and intent of the user to strengthen the gesture recognition process. Experimental results showed that while performing an image navigation task, mean intent recognition accuracy was 98.7% and that the false positive rate of gesture recognition dropped from 20.76% to 2.33% with context integration at similar recognition rates.