PhD Opportunity in XR-OR: Extended Reality Analytics for Smart Operating Rooms and Augmented Surgery

This is an opportunity for a talented PhD candidate with strong skills in developing prototype systems for Extended Reality (XR - which encompasses augmented and virtual reality) and/or Artificial Intelligence (AI); as well as an interest in finding ways to use advance human-computer interaction technologies to make surgery safer and more effective.

The successful candidate will join the Embodied Visualisation Research Group at Monash University under the supervision of Professor Tim Dwyer at Monash University, Australia's leading computer graphics researcher.

The Project

We invite applications from outstanding PhD candidates with undergraduate or postgraduate qualification in computer science with particular experience in one or more of the following areas:

• extended-reality application development
• modern AI techniques (such as computer vision or large multimodal language models)
• human-computer interaction

We seek to explore opportunities and challenges for the use of Extended Reality (XR) technologies (including augmented and virtual reality, as well as mixed-reality interaction techniques) to support surgeons, operating room technicians, and other professionals in and around operating room activities. Particular areas that may be explored are:

• Immersive OR analytics: using XR to analyse data from various operating room sources. We will focus on techniques that will make such data available through hands-free interaction such that data analysis can be performed even during operations. Will also explore the role of AI to guide or suggest analytics.
• Patient Data Analysis, Procedure Planning & Organ Segmentation: we will explore immersive XR interaction techniques for patient data segmentation and surgery planning.
• Hybrid User Interfaces and Collaboration: we will investigate XR support for collaboration across locations & devices, with a focus on surgical interventions, i.e. intra-operative but also for surgery planning. Use cases are remote mentoring, intra-operative team collaboration or training.
• Service and Maintenance: XR support of hospital/surgery theatre technicians in service, maintenance and repair tasks. Again, AI can be integrated to support and guide workers, for example, to support predictive maintenance and task planning.