Interactive, image-guided hepatic surgery

While laparoscopes are used for numerous minimally invasive procedures, minimally invasive liver resection and ablation occur infrequently. The paucity of cases is due to limited field of view and difficulty in determination of tumor location and margins under video guidance. By merging minimally invasive surgery with interactive, image-guided surgery, we hope to make laparoscopic liver procedures feasible. In previous work, we described methods for tracking an endoscope accurately in patient space and registration between endoscopic image space and physical space using the direct linear transformation (DLT). We have now developed a PC-based software system to display up to four 512 × 512 images indicating current surgical position using an active optical tracking system. We have used this system in several open liver cases and believe that a surface-based registration technique can be used to register physical space to tomographic space after liver mobilization. For preliminary phantom liver studies, our registration error is approximately 2.0mm. The surface-based registration technique will allow better localization of non-visible liver tumors, more accurate probe placement for ablation procedures, and more accurate margin determination for open surgical liver cases. The surface-based/DLT registration methods, in combination with the video display and tracked endoscope, will hopefully make laparoscopic liver cryoablation and resection procedures feasible.