Psychoacoustic sonification design for navigation in surgical interventions

A psychoacoustically motivated sonification design to guide clinicians in two-dimensional space is presented, e.g., to navigate a scalpel towards a target resection trajectory, ablation needle towards a preplanned insertion point, or drill towards a target burrhole for craniotomy. Navigation is achieved by mapping spatial dimensions to audio synthesis parameters that affect the magnitude of different perceptual sound qualities. Orthogonal spatial dimensions are mapped to orthogonal auditory qualities. In a preliminary laboratory study, non-expert users successfully identified the target field out of 16 possible fields in 41% of all trials. The correct cardinal direction was identified in 84% of the trials. Based on both findings and further psychoacoustic considerations, the mapping range is optimized, and an implementation of an additional depth dimension is discussed.