August 10, 2026 | IEEE TVCG'25 paper led by PhD student Sarah Eom receives the IEEE Computer Society 2025 Best Paper Award in the VR & AR category
Our paper titled Augmented Reality-Based Contextual Guidance through Surgical Tool Tracking in Neurosurgery is recognized with the IEEE Computer Society 2025 Best Paper Award in the VR & AR category. Heartfelt congratulations to the lead author, Sarah Eom, and the rest of the team.
In this work, we introduce NeuroLens, an Augmented Reality (AR) system that provides neurosurgeons with guidance that aids them in completing an EVD catheter placement. NeuroLens builds on prior work in AR-assisted EVD to present a registered hologram of a patient's ventricles to the surgeons, and uniquely incorporates guidance on the EVD catheter's trajectory, angle of insertion, and distance to the target. The guidance is enabled by tracking the EVD catheter. We evaluate NeuroLens via a study with 33 medical students and 9 neurosurgeons, in which we analyzed participants' EVD catheter insertion accuracy and completion time, eye gaze patterns, and qualitative responses. Our study, in which NeuroLens was used to aid students and surgeons in inserting an EVD catheter into a realistic phantom model of a human head, demonstrated the potential of NeuroLens as a tool that will aid and educate novice neurosurgeons.
