Sonification as a reliable alternative to conventional visual surgical navigation

Despite the undeniable advantages of image-guided surgical assistance systems in terms of accuracy, such systems have not yet fully met surgeons' needs or expectations regarding usability, time efficiency, and their integration into the surgical workflow. On the other hand, perceptual studies have shown that presenting independent but causally correlated information via multimodal feedback involving different sensory modalities can improve task performance. This article investigates an alternative method for computer-assisted surgical navigation, introduces a novel four-DOF sonification methodology for navigated pedicle screw placement, and discusses advanced solutions based on multisensory feedback. The proposed method comprises a novel four-DOF sonification solution for alignment tasks in four degrees of freedom based on frequency modulation synthesis. We compared the resulting accuracy and execution time of the proposed sonification method with visual navigation, which is currently considered the state of the art. We conducted a phantom study in which 17 surgeons executed the pedicle screw placement task in the lumbar spine, guided by either the proposed sonification-based or the traditional visual navigation method. The results demonstrated that the proposed method is as accurate as the state of the art while decreasing the surgeon's need to focus on visual navigation displays instead of the natural focus on surgical tools and targeted anatomy during task execution

Sonification of Rotation Instructions to Support Navigation of People with Visual Impairment

Indoor navigation services for people with visual impairment are being researched in academia, and working systems have already been deployed in public places. While previous research mainly focuses on computing the user's position with high accuracy, providing non-visual navigation instructions is also a challenge and naive approaches can fail in helping users reach their target destination or even expose them to hazards. In this paper we investigate the problem of guiding users to rotate towards a target direction. We propose three different sonification techniques that provide continuous guidance during rotation, and we compare them to a single-impulse baseline, used in previous works. We also explore three variations that reinforce the proposed techniques by combining them with the baseline. A preliminary study with 10 blind participants highlights two dominant techniques, which we analyze through a follow-up study with 18 participants, from 2 groups with very distant cultural backgrounds. While stark differences emerge in the performance from the two groups, we highlight two clear results common to both: 1) one of the proposed techniques significantly outperforms the baseline, reducing the average rotation error by a factor of 3.5 (from 11\ub0 to 3\ub0); 2) the interaction speed of this technique, generally slower than the baseline, significantly improves when combined with the baseline technique