Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, University of Split, Ruđera Boškovića 32, 21000 Split, Croatia.
Sensors (Basel). 2023 Dec 20;24(1):27. doi: 10.3390/s24010027.
Recent advances in extended reality (XR) technology have opened the possibility of significantly improving telemedicine systems. This is primarily achieved by transferring 3D information about patient state, which is utilized to create more immersive experiences on VR/AR headsets. In this paper, we propose an XR-based telemedicine collaboration system in which the patient is represented as a 3D avatar in an XR space shared by local and remote clinicians. The proposed system consists of an AR client application running on Microsoft HoloLens 2 used by a local clinician, a VR client application running on the HTC vive Pro used by a remote clinician, and a backend part running on the server. The patient is captured by a camera on the AR side, and the 3D body pose estimation is performed on frames from this camera stream to form a 3D patient avatar. Additionally, the AR and VR sides can interact with the patient avatar via virtual hands, and annotations can be performed on a 3D model. The main contribution of our work is the use of 3D body pose estimation for the creation of a 3D patient avatar. In this way, 3D body reconstruction using depth cameras is avoided, which reduces system complexity and hardware and network resources. Another contribution is the novel architecture of the proposed system, where audio and video streaming are realized using WebRTC protocol. The performance evaluation showed that the proposed system ensures high frame rates for both AR and VR client applications, while the processing latency remains at an acceptable level.
最近扩展现实 (XR) 技术的进步为显著改善远程医疗系统提供了可能。这主要是通过传输有关患者状态的 3D 信息来实现的,这些信息用于在 VR/AR 头显上创建更具沉浸感的体验。在本文中,我们提出了一种基于 XR 的远程医疗协作系统,其中患者在本地和远程临床医生共享的 XR 空间中表示为 3D 化身。该系统由运行在本地临床医生使用的 Microsoft HoloLens 2 上的 AR 客户端应用程序、运行在远程临床医生使用的 HTC vive Pro 上的 VR 客户端应用程序以及运行在服务器上的后端部分组成。患者由 AR 侧的摄像机捕获,并且在来自该摄像机流的帧上执行 3D 身体姿势估计以形成 3D 患者化身。此外,AR 和 VR 侧可以通过虚拟手与患者化身进行交互,并且可以在 3D 模型上进行注释。我们工作的主要贡献是使用 3D 身体姿势估计来创建 3D 患者化身。通过这种方式,避免了使用深度相机进行 3D 身体重建,从而降低了系统复杂性和硬件及网络资源的使用。另一个贡献是所提出系统的新颖架构,其中使用 WebRTC 协议实现音频和视频流。性能评估表明,所提出的系统确保了 AR 和 VR 客户端应用程序的高帧率,而处理延迟仍保持在可接受的水平。
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