Plenary Lecture
Virtual Reality and Augmented Visualization in Medicine and Surgery
Assistant Professor Lucio Tommaso De Paolis
Department of Engineering for Innovation
University of Salento
Italy
E-mail: lucio.depaolis@unisalento.it
Abstract: In medicine and surgery the Virtual Reality technology has made available new tools for diagnosis and therapy definition by translating the information contained in the medical images of the patients into 3D virtual models who are realistic replicas of real patients with their actual pathologies. This has allowed the development of a new form of medical education and training and the use of patient-specific surgical simulators has permitted to practice and rehearse the surgical procedures on digital clones of the real patients.
New applications of Augmented Reality technology, by means of the overlapping of virtual information on the real patient, provide systems that help surgeons in the intra-operative phase and permit to perform their tasks in ways that are both faster and safer. The use of the augmented visualization in surgery has the potential to bring the advantages of the open-surgery visualization also in the minimally invasive surgery.
Brief Biography of the Speaker: Lucio Tommaso De Paolis is the Director of the Augmented and Virtual Reality Laboratory (AVR Lab) at the Department of Engineering for Innovation of the University of Salento and the responsible of the “Advanced Techniques of Virtual Reality for Medicine” research groupof the DReAM (Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Research Applied to Medicine) at the Hospital of Lecce.
He received the Master Degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Pisa (Italy) in 1994 and after, first at the ScuolaSuperioreS.Anna of Pisa and then at the Universityof Salento, his research interest has concerned the study of realistic simulators for surgical training and the development of applications of Virtual and Augmented Reality in medicine and surgery.
De Paolis has been in 2012 visiting professor at the Vytautas Magnus University of Kaunas (Lithuania), in 2011 visiting professor at the University of Tallinn (Estonia), in 2007 and 2010 visiting researcher at the Centro de CienciasAplicadas y DesarrolloTecnológico (CCADET) – Universidad NacionalAutónoma de México (UNAM) – Mexico City (Messico), and in 2007 and 2009 visiting researcher at Computer Graphics Laboratory,Sabanci University of Istanbul (Turkey).