When employing multimodal images, adjusting scales and positions between them by determining spatial correspondences is necessary, and in surgical navigation combining real space where a patient is present and virtual space in a computer is necessary. These are an operation determining corresponding relations between images etc. represented at different coordinates, and called “registration”. Registration is the most important fundamental technique in surgical navigation and in dealing with different images, and a lot of efforts have been made in developing this technique. Though the registration technique was developed originally in industrial field, it has become remarkably advanced recently in medical imaging field, and presently it has power to pull the industrial field. Recently, two specialized books on registration were published successively. In the present article, registration techniques are explained from technical view point including the latest research trend.

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This paper proposes a representation method of volumetric medical data by using a surrounded display and a haptic display. The viewer is entirely surrounded by a spherical screen which projects volumetric medical data. Also the viewer can explore and interact with the data by using a haptic display. In this paper, we introduce two devices; an immersive projection display called Ensphered Vision and a haptic display named Haptic Master. Then we illustrate the method of representation the data with these devices. Finally the effect of the representation is discussed.

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To seek for a suitable man-machine interface (MMI) for a laparoscopic manipulator system considering the usability, simplicity and avoidance of an input error, we have developed several MMI and performed a quantitative experiment and invivo experiment. We developed head mouse system using a head mounted gyro sensor and voice recognition system. Furthermore, we proposed two command methods.(1) Random access method (RA): the surgeon directly commands the three degrees of freedom of the direction of the laparoscope.(2) Sequential access method (SA): the surgeon indicates the direction using the time difference of the On/Off command. By the quantitative evaluation experiment and in-vivo experiments we concluded that the voice recognition method takes more time to manipulate than the head mouse system and that SA method is more suitable than RA method for the laparoscope manipulator system. By the combination of the SA method and head mouse system, we achieved safe and simple man-machine interface.

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