Touchless interaction in surgery: The medical imaging toolkit experience

During the last few years, we have been witnessing a widespread interest on touchless technologies in the context of surgical procedures. The main reason is that surgeons often need to visualize medical images in operating rooms, but checking a computer through keyboard or mouse would result in a bacterial contamination. Touchless interfaces, which exploits sensor technologies and machine learning techniques for tracking and analyzing body movements, are advantageous in that they can preserve sterility around the patient. In fact, they allow surgeons to visualize medical images without having to physically touch any control or to rely on a proxy, who may not share the same level of professional vision. This talk aims to explore the main issues involved with the design of touchless user interfaces for intra-operative image control. It will overview state-of-the-art solutions, open challenges and research agenda in this area. Moreover, the talk will present the results of the Medical Imaging Toolkit (MITO) project, which has been focused on the design and implementation of a Kinect-based touchless user interface for pre- and intra-operative visualization of DICOM images.