STEREOSCOPIC VISUALIZATION IN ENDOSCOPIC SURGERY - PROBLEMS, BENEFITS, AND POTENTIALS

in recent years the application of 3D video endoscopic systems in clin ical routine, especially, in the field of endoscopic surgery, has incr eased steadily. The number of 3D video endoscopic systems used in the operating theatre today is obviously lower-than the number of establis hed traditional 2D video endoscopic systems, The hesitant application of the new technology can be mainly explained try the lack of evaluati on of its influence on the surgical procedure and on patient benefit a s well as by the need for specific economic analysis, The. starting po int for our investigations was to analyze the influence of 3D video en doscopy on endoscopically guided manipulations in general, in order to achieve quantitative statements we performed laboratory experiments u sing human factors analyzing methods, In the next step we performed cl inical field studies of the application of 3D video endoscopic systems for a side-by-side comparison of 2D and 3D systems, These studies sho wed that the use of 3D video endoscopy has an improving influence on e ndoscopically guided surgical manipulations is well as on the intraope rative procedures, We also found that spatial visual perception of ste reoscopic images of 3D video systems may cause problems for some users , For the validation of stereoscopic visualization systems we addition ally studied the influence of isolated technical, optical, and physiol ogical parameters on visual perception as well as on transposition int o visually guided manipulations. Detailed results of these investigati ons concerning the influence of 3D video endoscopy on binocular percep tion are presented.