Abstract
Image modalities such as ultrasound imaging, MRI and CT are widely used for surgical planning or navigation. However, surgeons are forced to observe the affected area with switching their gaze direction between the patient and medical images on a monitor. Therefore, it’s difficult to obtain the surgical target position intuitively and to use the accurate positional information of medical images effectively. To solve the problems, we developed an image overlay system consisting of a tablet PC, which is gradually spread and easily available, a 3-D optical tracking system, an image processing PC, and wireless communication system. The image processing PC constructs appropriate overlay images of 3-D CG model from pre-acquired MRI (or CT) images by using the tablet PC’s position and posture data measured by the 3-D optical tracking system. The overlay images are transmitted from the image processing PC to the tablet PC via wireless communication system and are overlaid onto the video images of the surgical-field on the tablet PC’s monitor. In a phantom experiment, the maximum image overlay error was 1.0±0.5 mm, and it was considered that the proposed system enables surgeons to plan the surgical approach and navigate the surgical target intuitively and accurately.
