Evaluating and Validating an Automated Registration System for Enhanced Reality Visualization in Surgery

W. Eric L. Grimson, Gil J. Ettinger, Steve J. White, P. Langham Gleason, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, William M. Wells III, Ron Kikinis

Abstract: Frameless guidance systems are needed to help surgeons plan exact locations for incisions, define margins of tumors and precisely locate critical structures. We describe an automatic method for registering clinical data, such as segmented MRI or CT, with any view of the patient, demonstrated on neurosurgery examples. The method enables mixing live video of the patient with the segmented 3D MRI or CT model, supporting enhanced reality techniques for planning and guiding procedures, and for interactively, non-intrusively viewing internal structures. We detail a computational evaluation of the method’s performance, and clinical experiments using the system in actual neurosurgical cases.