This work examines spatial anchoring strategies to position augmented reality guidance during surgery. We consider three strategies: anchoring to the Patient, the surgical Tool, and the Surgeon's head. These strategies were evaluated in a first experiment involving 24 non-professional participants, using two guidance techniques: 3D Trajectory and 2D Crosshair. For 3D Trajectory, Patient and Tool anchoring were more precise than Surgeon anchoring, and Patient anchoring was the most preferred. For 2D Crosshair, no significant effect of anchoring strategies on precision was observed. However, participants preferred Patient and Surgeon anchoring. A second experiment with 6 surgeons confirmed the first experiment's results. For 3D trajectory, Tool anchoring proved more precise than Patient anchoring, despite surgeons' preference for Patient anchoring. These findings contribute to empirical evidence for the design of surgical AR guidance, with potential applications for similar, less critical tasks.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713350
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2025.acm.org/)