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. 2023 Feb 23:12466:12466-51.

The Effect of Luminance on Depth Perception in Augmented Reality Guided Laparoscopic Surgery

Athena Reissis  1 , Soojeong Yoo  1   2 , Matthew J Clarkson  1 , Stephen Thompson  1
Affiliations

The Effect of Luminance on Depth Perception in Augmented Reality Guided Laparoscopic Surgery

Athena Reissis et al. Proc SPIE Int Soc Opt Eng. .

Abstract

Depth perception is a major issue in surgical augmented reality (AR) with limited research conducted in this scientific area. This study establishes a relationship between luminance and depth perception. This can be used to improve visualisation design for AR overlay in laparoscopic surgery, providing surgeons a more accurate perception of the anatomy intraoperatively. Two experiments were conducted to determine this relationship. First, an online study with 59 participants from the general public, and second, an in-person study with 10 surgeons as participants. We developed 2 open-source software tools utilising SciKit-Surgery libraries to enable these studies and any future research. Our findings demonstrate that the higher the relative luminance, the closer a structure is perceived to the operating camera. Furthermore, the higher the luminance contrast between the two structures, the higher the depth distance perceived. The quantitative results from both experiments are in agreement, indicating that online recruitment of the general public can be helpful in similar studies. An observation made by the surgeons from the in-person study was that the light source used in laparoscopic surgery plays a role in depth perception. This is due to its varying positioning and brightness which could affect the perception of the overlaid AR. We found that luminance directly correlates with depth perception for both surgeons and the general public, regardless of other depth cues. Future research may focus on comparing different colours used in surgical AR and using a mock operating room (OR) with varying light sources and positions.

Keywords: Augmented reality; depth perception; image guidance; laparoscopic surgery; luminance contrast; visualisation.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Green (G) and yellow (Y) at three relative luminance levels (L1, L2 & L3). These were the colours used for the tumours in the online study.
Figure 2
Figure 2. A sample of the images used for the online study, showing changes in tumour luminance and colour together with changes in the background image brightness.
Figure 3
Figure 3. The ten different luminance levels of each colour that is presented in this experiment. The relative luminance values are displayed at the top and correspond to both the green and yellow colours displayed directly below it.
Figure 4
Figure 4. The in-person study utilised an anatomical liver phantom plus see through augmented reality on a tablet computer.
Figure 5
Figure 5. Boxplot showing the depth distances perceived in relation to the luminance contrasts. The green triangles represent the means: 0% - 2.4cm, 30% - 3.0cm, 60% - 3.8cm.
Figure 6
Figure 6. Boxplot presenting the Likert scale results from usability questions. 1 = Disagree and 5 = Agree.
Figure 7
Figure 7. Boxplot showing the luminance contrast selected by the participants to represent certain depth distances. The green triangle represents the means: 0 - 2.5%, 3 - 25.8%, 4.5 - 47.5%, 7.5 - 73.2%.
Figure 8
Figure 8. Boxplot presenting the Likert scale results from system usability survey. 1 = Disagree and 5 = Agree.
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