[Expanded reality in head surgery]

The preoperative planning of complex craniofacial surgical interventions is increasingly realized with the aid of appropriate planning systems in order to achieve high precision, minimal invasion and protection of risk areas. But the most important step from the planning to the actual intervention consists of providing the planning data intraoperatively in a reasonable and easy to handle way. In this regard, augmented reality is one of the most challenging and promising techniques to solve this problem. In this paper we present two different systems based on see-through glasses resp. a common video projector to directly visualize the planning data in the surgeon's field of view. The work is funded by the 'Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)' and Stryker Leibinger Freiburg/Germany.

Intraoperative visualization of surgical planning data using video projectors

The Institute for Process Control and Robotics has developed a new system using projector based augmented reality for the intraoperative visualization of preoperatively defined surgical planning data. Projector based augmented reality in medical applications represents a new field of research and gives an alternative solution to the commonly used Head Mounted Display technology. Moreover, the projector is not only used for visualization, but also for registration of the patient without the usage of invasive fiducial techniques as e.g. screw markers or frames. Recent results showed an achieved accuracy of +/- 1.5 mm which roughly meets clinical demands.

A new oscillating saw for robotic aided surgery

In this paper a brief description of a computer and robotic aided surgery system is given with a detailed overview of the necessity to develop special tools for robotic surgery. The application range of this robotic system has been specially focused on the orthopaedics field and, more particularly, on the execution of osteotomies. It was therefore necessary to develop a new saw device which would meet medical and--from the robot system point of view--mechanical as well as functional requirements. After describing the device which was developed on the basis of these requirements, a detailed comparative study of off-the-shelf oscillating saws and the new device is given at the end of the paper.

[Nephropathology caused by congenital syphilis. Report of a case]

A case of congenital syphilis is reported. It deals with a three-month-old girl suffering from a nephropathy clinically characterized by edema, hematuria, severe proteinuria and slight renal insufficiency. On light an delectron microscopy, a mesangial proliferative and focal extracapillary proliferative glomerulonephritis with abundant intermembranoepithelial deposits was observed.