A navigation system with high accuracy is required for performing precise surgery. To obtain high accuracy, three factors should be considered: acquiring precise image data of patient, measuring an accurate intraoperative patient position and reducing registration error. Although it spends a lot of efforts to set up the system during surgery, its performance does not always satisfy surgeons.
During this decade, we have developed a surgical navigation system for aortic aneurysm repair and utilized it in one hundred clinical cases. It has been found that this system has needed to improve the usability and the reliability in registration process to show valuable information for surgery. Our recent system adopts a two-phased approach with different goals. Before thoracotomy, it exhibits the location of a target intercostal artery in the thorax and supports a surgeon to determine an appropriate approach to repair aortic aneurysm in each patient setup and anatomy. After adhesiolysis, it narrows the range of existing area of the artery within five millimeters and assists him to identify the artery.
In 2016, its improved system is ready to use for clinical pre-trial with approval from Hospital Ethics Committee of Tokyo Women's Medical University. In the next two years, it is hoped that the improved system provides the clinical benefit.
