Abstract
In this study, we have developed a wireless surgical navigation system with a multi Wi-Fi optical 3D tracking system for image-guided surgery. The proposed system can obtain position information using these two concurrently usable wireless systems to guide an instrument. As a result, it can eliminate the line-of-sight problem of tracking markers. Furthermore, the use of the multi Wi-Fi optical 3D tracking system reduces the need for connecting cables. Moreover, the system is highly robust owing to the unitization of the system components using Wi-Fi. The two navigation systems can guide the instrument concurrently using position information obtained from the tracking systems. Furthermore, they can easily perform re-registration by using the relative position of the tracking systems and the instrument position information. We evaluated the mean Target Registration Error (TRE) of the system by performing re-registration ten times. The mean TRE of the ten points of the phantom was found to be 1.43±0.75 and 1.43±0.77 mm by the fast Wi-Fi tracking system and the second Wi-Fi tracking system, respectively. Moreover, the mean TRE increased by at most 0.96 mm when re-registration was performed ten times. This suggests that our system has sufficient re-registration accuracy for navigation. Therefore, we believe that the developed system will be effective for image-guided surgery.
