Auditory feedback to support image-guided medical needle placement

Abstract

Purpose During medical needle placement using image-guided navigation systems, the clinician must concentrate on a screen. To reduce the clinician’s visual reliance on the screen, this work proposes an auditory feedback method as a stand-alone method or to support visual feedback for placing the navigated medical instrument, in this case a needle. Methods An auditory synthesis model using pitch comparison and stereo panning parameter mapping was developed to augment or replace visual feedback for navigated needle placement. In contrast to existing approaches which augment but still require a visual display, this method allows view-free needle placement. An evaluation with 12 novice participants compared both auditory and combined audiovisual feedback against existing visual methods. Results Using combined audiovisual display, participants show similar task completion times and report similar subjective workload and accuracy while viewing the screen less compared to using the conventional visual method. The auditory feedback leads to higher task completion times and subjective workload compared to both combined and visual feedback. Conclusion Audiovisual feedback shows promising results and establish a basis for applying auditory feedback as a supplement to visual information to other navigated interventions, especially those for which viewing a patient is beneficial or necessary.

Visual display for surgical targeting: concepts and usability study

“…It is interesting, however, that coupling two interfaces demonstrated high usability results with high localization accuracy and small trajectory and duration time, which indicates potential for possible improvements. A similar conclusion was reached in [20] when combining audiovisual display for an ablation needle placement. Generally, neuropsychologists show that by accumulating the amount of information with good quality will help observers make better decisions about the target especially in case of low prevalence (the target can be located anywhere in the phantoms) [21].…”

Review of Advanced Medical Telerobots

“…Deployment of visual augmentation has been successful using telerobotic surgical systems, and commercialized examples have been using mentioned advanced features [1]. Besides visual augmentation, auditory cues have also been provided for the surgeons to enhance sensory awareness [118][119][120]. However, since the audio channel has been occupied heavily in operating rooms for communication between surgical team members, in commercialized examples, the auditory channel has not been utilized extensively.…”

Psychoacoustical Signal Processing for Three-dimensional Sonification

“…The human listener is able to localize sound sources in threedimensional space. Hence, sonification for navigation in one- [9,10], two- [11], and three-dimensional space [12] often employs This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution: Non Commercial 4.0 International License. The full terms of the License are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0 spatial audio by means of binaural headphone presentation or loudspeaker arrays.…”