TIMMS Visualization Manager

Visualization plays a major and important role in image guided surgery (IGS) and in the operating room (OR) of the future. Most of the IGS systems consist of a central viewer for the visualization of patient specific data with advanced surgical assistance. This, however, is also one of the major drawbacks of current visualization systems: they are limited to a single device and are therefore neither interoperable nor scalable.

The objective of the TIMMS visualization manager is to serve network connected imaging modalities with components and methods for data visualization: imaging devices can be easily integrated, perform seamless sharing of image data, and visualize data on any application viewer or on a remote console. Figure below shows a conceptual of the visualization manger.

 

 

Conceptual diagram of visualization manager and media device categories in an OR network

The novelty of devising such a visualization framework lies in identification and standardization of device interfaces. In visualization, devices can be mainly categorized to types such as sources, transmitters, processors, receivers, and sinks. OR devices are categorized, firstly, according to their types. Then the common functionality and properties for each categorized type are identified.With the knowledge of the common functionality for each category, interfaces for devices and data structures for the data can be defined. This common functionality is then implemented as a single TIMMS rendering component called TIMMS visualization manager.


The visualization manager directly or indirectly implements the data (video, image, and signals) acquisition and transport mechanisms. Apart from offering basic visualization components and functionalities to the imaging modalities, the TIMMS visualizationmanager offers other functionality and handling methods as well, such as the synchronization of data, the configuration of the visualization, and the assurance of visualization quality.


Thus our novel TIMMS visualization manager as a core rendering component tries to solve the limitations of existing operating room visualization devices and software and provides the following features to the TIMMS imaging devices:

 

  1. A distributed visualization of patient and surgical context data within an OR network
  2. An abstraction of the visualization process
  3. A rapid development of advanced visualization systems by plugging existing rendering devices or components
  4. Interoperability between different imaging modalities.