Name of the participant: Maurice Rekrut
Description of the IT research project: Neurosurgery as a medical specialty deals with the surgical treatment of damage and diseases of the central and peripheral nervous system. Such microsurgical interventions are performed manually by experienced neurosurgeons with the aid of an operating microscope. However, the imaging requirements with regard to positioning, viewing angle and focal plane can change throughout the operation, making it necessary for the surgeon to adjust the configuration of the operating microscope.
Since adjustments currently have to be carried out manually, which makes a brief interruption of the operation necessary, individual risk assessments are made in each case to determine whether a correction of the field of vision is appropriate in the present surgical situation. Often, due to a too high risk of an interruption of the operation, the operation is continued under suboptimal visibility conditions. The aim of the project BISON is therefore the conception and implementation of an intuitive control of operating microscopes by measured brain activity without the use of hands. The developed solution is based on non-invasive methods for measuring the electrical activity of the brain, using headsets for measuring the electroencephalogram (EEG). The interface between the brain and the computer or machine developed in this way is known as the brain-computer interface (BCI) and should enable the surgeon to adjust the settings of the microscope during surgery without using the hands. In the present scenario, the requirements focus on robustness and user-friendliness of the interaction principles in order to demonstrate the feasibility of an active BCI control in a real application in the working world.
System overview see figure.
Software Campus-Partner: DFKI, Zeiss
Implementation period: 01.01.2020 – 30.06.2021