HoloLens-Based AR System with a Robust Point Set Registration Algorithm

By the standard of today’s image-guided surgery (IGS) technology, in order to check and verify the progress of the surgery, the surgeons still require divert their attention from the patients occasionally to check against the display. In this paper, a mixed-reality system for medical use is proposed that combines an Intel RealSense sensor with Microsoft’s Hololens head-mounted display system, for superimposing medical data onto the physical surface of a patient, so the surgeons do not need to divert their attention from their patients. The main idea of our proposed system is to display the 3D medical images of the patients on the actual patients themselves by placing the medical images and the patients in the same coordinate space. However, the virtual medical data may contain noises and outliers, so the transformation mapping function must be able to handle these problems. The transform function in our system is performed by the use of our proposed Denoised-Resampled-Weighted-and-Perturbed-Iterative Closest Points (DRWP-ICP) algorithm, which performs denoising and removal of outliers before aligning the pre-operative medical image data points to the patient’s physical surface position before displaying the result using the Microsoft HoloLens display system. The experimental results shows that our proposed mixed-reality system using DRWP-ICP is capable of performing accurate and robust mapping despite the presence of noise and outliers.