IEEE Access (Jan 2020)

Design of Navigation System for Liver Surgery Guided by Augmented Reality

  • Fengfeng Zhang,
  • Shi Zhang,
  • Kai Zhong,
  • Lingtao Yu,
  • Li Ning Sun

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3008690
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8
pp. 126687 – 126699

Abstract

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The traditional surgical navigation system combining preoperative CT and intraoperative ultrasound is widely used in open hepatectomy, but the problem of this system is that there are some errors in terms of the precision of the time and the space during the surgery. In order to solve the above problems, this paper introduces augmented reality technology into the surgical navigation system. In order to accurately describe the biomechanical characteristics of the liver and let the navigation system perform more accurately, this paper uses Tetgen to perform tetrahedral partition on the triangle mesh data obtained after the three-dimensional CT was reconstructed, and then the surface mesh data and the internal tetrahedral data were obtained and they were used to describe a whole liver model. The surface triangle mesh data is used to render graphics and describe the surface topology change, and the internal tetrahedral data combined with mass-spring theory is used to simulate deformation. Subsequently, the ex vivo pig liver was used to experimentally verify the accuracy of gravity deformation of the liver model, and the results show that the error was mainly distributed between −2mm and −2.5mm. At the same time, this paper uses the NDI Polaris infrared tracking system to carry out precision experiments on the augmented reality module, and the measured error is 1.55± 0.29mm. Finally, various modules of the system are integrated to finish the experiment in which the ring-shaped lesions are cut from the ex vivo pig liver with the aid of augmented reality. The experimental error is 0± 1.26mm, and with the assistance of the general purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU), the refresh rate is above 200FPS. The results prove that the liver surgery navigation system proposed in this paper is excellent in terms of real-time performance and accuracy, which can help doctors accurately locate the tumor during surgery and perform ideal resection.

Keywords