Augmented reality for sentinel lymph node biopsy

Peter A. von Niederhäusern, Carlo Seppi, Robin Sandkühler, Guillaume Nicolas, Stephan K. Haerle, Philippe C. Cattin

Abstract: Sentinel lymph node biopsy for oral and oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma is a well-established staging method. One variation is to inject a radioactive tracer near the primary tumor of the patient. After a few minutes, audio feedback from an external hand-held \(\gamma \)-detection probe can monitor the uptake into the lymphatic system. Such probes place a high cognitive load on the surgeon during the biopsy, as they require the simultaneous use of both hands and the skills necessary to correlate the audio signal with the location of tracer accumulation in the lymph nodes. Therefore, an augmented reality (AR) approach to directly visualize and thus discriminate nearby lymph nodes would greatly reduce the surgeons’ cognitive load.

External IDs:dblp:journals/cars/NiederhausernSSNHC24