This morning Avi Yaron and Joe Rollero of Visionsense visited Insight Media headquarters in Norwalk, Connecticut to demonstrate their 3D camera technology. This micro-miniature camera technology can be expected to appear in medical equipment, primarily for minimally invasive surgery (MIS), in mid-2008.

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

3D MIS has been well received by doctors, at least in principle. According to Yaron, the Intuitive Surgical system has been especially well received. Unfortunately this system is very large and very expensive, even by the standards of medical equipment, which has limited its sales and penetration into the minimally invasive surgery market. Currently, minimally invasive surgery represents only about 15% of all surgery. One of the limits on MIS is based on the difficulty of doing surgery with only 2D images.

The basic Visionsense technology uses a single sensor which can be a CMOS or CCD imager. Their "Punto" detector, shown in the photo with a camera containing the detector, has a diagonal of 3.3 mm. The sensor has a microlens and a color filter array applied to it in a manner much like an autostereoscopic LCD panel. In an autostereoscopic display, this produces two or more "sweet spots" for the pupils of the eyes to receive different images. In the camera configuration, the system essentially runs backwards and the two sweet spots become the interpupillary distance for the 3D camera. This single sensor approach can produce very small cameras. The relatively large physical size of other 3D camera offerings with two sensors for medical applications has limited their use in MIS. Visionsense has 5 granted patents on the technology plus numerous other patents pending, according to Yaron.

This arrangement provides an interpupillary distance of about 1/2 to 2/3 the imager diagonal. This provides stereo images out to about 20 to 30 times the interpupillary distance, or in the case of the Punto chip, out to an inch or two. While this is enough for many MIS applications, when it is not enough there are two approaches to increase the stereo range. First, you can use a larger image sensor, and Visionsense is working on a high-resolution sensor 6.8 mm in diameter. If that doesn’t provide a large enough interpupillary distance for an application, prisms can be used in the pupil plane to separate the two pupils as necessary.

Visionsense is developing the camera sensor, camera module including optics and electronics and support software. They demonstrated for me both pre-recorded 3D video of actual medical procedures and live 3D video coming from a sample camera containing the Punto sensor. Yaron emphasized that Visionsense was display technology neutral and the final display for any medical instrument using Visionsense technology would be chosen by the Visionsense customers, not by Visionsense itself. Their technology has been used as an image source with MacNaughton, Planar and Philips 3D displays and could be used with any other 3D display technology as well. They have also used single and dual projector installations for demonstrations at medical trade shows, for example.

One interesting software tool Visionsense has developed is called Image Fusion. This tool takes an image from a 3D source such as an MRI or CAT scan and warps it to overlay the live 3D image from the camera. The system shows the fused image on the surgeon’s 3D monitor. This would allow the surgeon to see, for example, how far away his tools are from the spinal cord while doing disc surgery, even if the cord is not yet visible in the camera image.

After leaving Insight Media, Yaron and Rollero were heading up to Boston for several scheduled meetings. While Yaron would not disclose any customers or potential customers at this point, he said it was necessary to visit both potential Visionsense customers in the medical equipment business and potential end users in hospitals. Medical equipment manufacturers are unlikely to commit to designing and building a piece of equipment using new technology until the concept and the design has been blessed by doctors. Therefore, it’s necessary for Visionsense to visit end users as well as medical equipment manufacturers.

No medical equipment is currently on sale using Visionsense cameras. Yaron expects this to change in mid-2008, however. At that point he expects FDA-approved medical equipment containing Visionsense technology to appear on the market. While Visionsense is currently focused on medical systems, Yaron eventually expects there will be non-medical applications for the technology as well.

Learn about the use of 3D technology in a variety of applications including medical by attending the 3D Biz-Ex conference September 18th and 19th.

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