David Black, Christian Hansen, Arya Nabavi, Ron Kikinis, Horst Hahn. In International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery (accepted February 2017)

This article investigates the current state of the art of the use of auditory display in image-guided medical interventions. Auditory display is a means of conveying information using sound, and we review the use of this approach to support navigated interventions. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of published systems and outline directions for future investigation.

We undertook a review of scientific articles on the topic of auditory rendering in image- guided intervention. This includes methods for avoidance of risk structures and instrument placement and manipulation. The review did not include auditory display for status monitoring, for instance in anesthesia.

We identified 14 publications in the course of the search. Most of the literature 62% investigates the use of auditory display to convey distance of a tracked instrument to an object using proximity or safety margins. The remainder discuss continuous guidance for navigated instrument placement. Four of the articles present clinical evaluations, 9 present laboratory evaluations, and 3 present informal evaluation (3 present both laboratory and clinical evaluations).

In summary, auditory display is a growing field that has been largely neglected in research in image-guided intervention. Despite benefits of auditory displays reported in both the reviewed literature and non-medical fields, adoption in medicine has been slow. Future challenges include increasing interdisciplinary cooperation with auditory display investigators to develop more meaningful auditory display designs and comprehensive evaluations which target the benefits and drawbacks of auditory display in image guidance.