Abstract
In this paper, we propose a method for generating virtual laparoscopic images for the aid of laparoscopic surgery. Since the field of view of a laparoscope is very limited, the load of a surgeon who performs laparoscopic surgery is quite large. It would be very useful to generate virtual laparoscopic images from pre-operative CT or MRI images. Since the abdominal wall is lifted during laparoscopic surgery, it is required to deform an original CT image for generating a virtual laparoscopic image. We extract the abdominal wall semi-automatically and model the extracted abdominal wall by using a node and spring model. The method lifts the abdominal wall by elastic deformation. A virtual laparoscopic image is obtained by reconstructing the CT image from the result of elastic deformation. We applied the proposed method to four abdominal X-ray CT images. Experimental results showed that the proposed method could generate virtual laparoscopic images and were very useful for pre-operative surgical planning and intra-operative surgical navigation.
