Intraoperative Augmented Reality for Vitreoretinal Surgery using Edge Computing

PurposeAugmented reality (AR) may allow vitreoretinal surgeons to leverage microscope-integrated digital imaging systems to analyze and highlight key retinal anatomic features in real-time, possibly improving safety and precision during surgery. By employing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for retina vessel segmentation, a retinal coordinate system can be created that allows pre-operative images of capillary non-perfusion or retinal breaks to be digitally aligned and overlayed upon the surgical field in real-time. Such technology may be useful in assuring thorough laser treatment of capillary non-perfusion or in using pre-operative optical coherence tomography (OCT) to guide macular surgery when microscope-integrated OCT (MIOCT) is not available. MethodsThis study is a retrospective analysis involving the development and testing of a novel image registration algorithm for vitreoretinal surgery. Fifteen anonymized cases of pars plana vitrectomy with epiretinal membrane peeling, along with corresponding preoperative fundus photographs and optical coherence tomography (OCT) images, were retrospectively collected from the Mayo Clinic database. We developed a TPU (Tensor-Processing Unit)-accelerated CNN for semantic segmentation of retinal vessels from fundus photographs and subsequent real-time image registration in surgical video streams. An iterative patch-wise cross-correlation (IPCC) algorithm was developed for image registration, with a focus on optimizing processing speeds and maintaining high spatial accuracy. The primary outcomes measured were processing speed in frames per second (FPS) and the spatial accuracy of image registration, quantified by the Dice coefficient between registered and manually aligned images. ResultsWhen deployed on an Edge TPU, the CNN model combined with our image registration algorithm processed video streams at a rate of 14 FPS, which is superior to processing rates achieved on other standard hardware configurations. The IPCC algorithm efficiently aligned pre-operative and intraoperative images, showing high accuracy in comparison to manual registration. ConclusionThis study demonstrates the feasibility of using TPU-accelerated CNNs for enhanced AR in vitreoretinal surgery.