With the development of the augmented reality (AR) concept, the ways to apply AR to minimally invasive surgery (MIS) for surgical navigation purposes have become a widely discussed topic. Currently, in situ AR navigation systems are usually implemented using a glasses-free 3D display to represent the preoperative tissue structure, and can provide intuitive see-through guidance information. However, due to changes in intraoperative tissue, the preoperative tissue structure is not able to exactly correspond to reality, which influences the precision of in situ AR navigation. To solve this problem, we propose a method to update the tissue structure for in situ AR navigation in such way to reflect changes in intraoperative tissue.
The proposed method to update the tissue structure is based on the calibrated ultrasound and two-level surface warping technologies. Firstly, the particle filter-based calibration is implemented to perform ultrasound calibration and obtain intraoperative position of anatomical points. Secondly, intraoperative positions of anatomical points are inputted in the two-level surface warping method to update the preoperative tissue structure. Finally, the glasses-free real 3-D display of the updated tissue structure is finished, and is superimposed onto a patient by a translucent mirror for in situ AR navigation. Results: we validated the proposed method by simulating liver tissue intervention, and achieved the tissue updating accuracy of 92.86%. Furthermore, the targeting error of AR navigation based on the proposed method was also evaluated through minimally invasive liver surgery, and the acquired mean targeting error was 1.92 mm. The results demonstrate that the proposed AR navigation method is effective
The obtained results confirm that the proposed in situ AR navigation system can be used to provide doctors with the accurate 3D navigation information and allow solving the hand-eye coordination problem.
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