In recent years, the application of the medical crane tower is becoming more and more important in the operating rooms, so the healthcare industry puts forward higher requirements about the medical crane tower, mainly in the respect of security, reliability and intelligence etc. This paper designs an embedded intelligent medical crane tower system after studying many kinds of path planning algorithms, and gets the obstacle information of the medical crane tower system. This system uses the machine vision system, through the image processing technology to make obstacle analysis about the surroundings of medical crane tower. In addition, this paper proposes a realtime obstacle avoidance algorithm for the specific work environment of the operating room. The experimental results show that the medical crane tower system can achieve the function of stable automatic operation and realtime obstacle avoidance, and also have the features of security、reliability and intelligence etc.