Techniques For Fast And Accurate Intrasurgical Registration

Abstract

The goal of intra-surgical registration is to establish a common reference frame between pre-surgical and intra-surgical 3-D data sets that correspond to the same anatomy. This paper presents two novel techniques which have application to this problem: high-speed pose tracking, and intra-surgical data selection. In the first part of this paper, we describe an approach for tracking the pose of arbitrarily-shaped rigid objects at rates up to 10Hz. Static accuracies on the order of 1mm in translation and 1 degree in rotation have been achieved. We have demonstrated the technique on a human face using a high-speed VLSI range sensor; however, the technique is independent of the sensor used or the anatomy tracked. In the second part of this paper, we describe a general purpose approach for selecting near-optimal, intra-surgical registration data. Due to high costs associated with the acquisition of intra-surgical data, it is desirable to minimize the amount of data acquired, while ensuring that registration accuracy requirements are met. We synthesize near-optimal intra-surgical data sets, based upon an analysis of differential surface properties of pre-surgical data. We demonstrate, using data from a human femur, that discrete point data sets selected using our method provide superior pose refinement accuracy to those selected by human experts.