Intra-Operative Eye-tracking System

Background

Eye-tracking has made its way into healthcare in the fields of radiology and pathology to evaluate expert gaze patterns. The application of eye-tracking in the surgical field still needs development and there are potential benefits of using gaze-tracking in the surgical field. There is still a gap in the literature in identifying the benefits related to communication and education in a real surgical setting and how that translates to patient safety. This is due in part to the difficulties of integrating a gaze-tracking system in the operating room, as well as concerns over the high cost of commercially available devices.

Technology Overview

This solution from UHN researchers is a cost-effective gaze-tracking system focused on the surgical setting

The gaze data is collected by a workstation where it is registered, transformed into a pixel location, and sent to a hardware device for further processing, such as a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The FPGA serves as the real-time processing unit to combine the video feed from an Olympus rack together with the gaze location from the research workstation and embedded fiducials. The superimposed video is then sent out to the audiovisual (AV) cabinet to be displayed on the surgical monitors.

Currently, no OR vendors offer integrated eye tracking hardware or fusion with their endoscopy systems or audiovisual equipment.

Opportunity

• Available for joint venture, co-development or licensing