Enhanced perception of carotid artery depth under nasal endoscope

Augmented reality (AR) is a constantly growing technology in computer science; it has also been widely used in the medical field. Generally, the required virtual models are superimposed on the natural environments to provide medical imaging data and other patient information. However, the depth perception could not be provided by the simple superposition of virtual and real contents. We propose a method which combines pseudo chromadepth (PCD), simulation of perspective projection (SPP), and gradient-based contour enhancement (GCE). The proposed method is adopted with clinical data; 16 participants are allowed to complete the depth perception judgment task and the subjective assessment questionnaire. Experimental results show that the accuracy of this method is close to 100% in depth perception tasks. Thus, it is better than direct volume rendering (DVR) method and other depth perception enhancement methods. Furthermore, the proposed method has the highest score in the Likert scale. These results indicate that through the combined effect of depth information and overall contour enhancement, the proposed method can effectively enhance the depth perception of the carotid artery under nasal endoscopic images.