Intra-operative “Pick-Up” Ultrasound for Robot Assisted Surgery with Vessel Extraction and Registration: A Feasibility Study

  • Caitlin Schneider
  • Julian Guerrero
  • Christopher Nguan
  • Robert Rohling
  • Septimiu Salcudean
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 6689)

Abstract

We propose the use of a “pick-up” ultrasound transducer for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgeries. Unlike prior approaches, the ultrasound transducer is inserted before the procedure and remains in the abdominal cavity throughout. We present a new design for such an intra-abdominal ultrasound transducer with a handle that can be grasped in a repeatable manner using a da Vinci Pro-Grasp tool. The main application is mapping the vasculature, which is segmented from Doppler and B-mode images using a Kalman-filtering approach. Our goal is employ the vasculature to register pre-operative CT to intra-operative camera images. To demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, we use an ultrasound flow phantom to register a CT surface model to extracted ultrasound vessel center points using an iterative closest point method. The transducer was tracked with electromagnetic sensors and a target registration error of 3.2 mm was calculated. The initial application will be nephrectomy where vessel localization is paramount.

Keywords

Robotic surgery kidney ultrasound CT image registration 

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011

Authors and Affiliations

  • Caitlin Schneider
    • 1
  • Julian Guerrero
    • 1
  • Christopher Nguan
    • 2
  • Robert Rohling
    • 1
  • Septimiu Salcudean
    • 1
  1. 1.Electrical and Computer EngineeringUniversity of British ColumbiaCanada
  2. 2.Department of UrologyVancouver General HospitalCanada

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