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Original Article

A hybrid method to improve target registration accuracy in surgical navigation

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Pages 356-363 | Received 16 Jul 2014, Accepted 05 Jan 2015, Published online: 11 Mar 2015
 

Abstract

Background: The accuracy of surgical navigation depends greatly on that of registration between the patient and the medical image. Point-based registration has been the most common and reliable method, which typically uses skin markers. Unfortunately, high registration accuracy around the markers is not sustained at targets deeply seated within the body. To address such increase in target registration error (TRE), we proposed a hybrid point-based registration method that incorporates anatomical landmarks near the target. Material and methods: Ultrasound calibration is performed with an optical tracker for coordinate frame conversion of image coordinates into the real world. With the calibrated ultrasound probe, we could non-invasively obtain landmark positions near the target, being used together with skin markers for registration. Results: In the experiment, we examined registration accuracies achieved with and without use of an anatomical landmark. We confirmed that using an additional anatomical landmark in registration resulted in an increase in fiducial regsitration error (FRE), but a significant decrease in TRE (p < 0.001). Conclusion: We proposed and demonstrated the effectiveness of a hybrid method that uses both artificial and anatomical landmarks for patient-to-image registration. The experimental results confirmed that an improvement in TRE was evident by the proposed method, suggesting its feasibility in various spinal surgeries.

Declaration of interest: This work was supported in part by the Industrial Source Technology Development Program of the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy of Korea (10040097) and by the R&D Program of the DGIST Convergence Science Center (12-BD-0401). The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

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