Electromagnetic Navigation for Thoracic Aortic Stent-graft Deployment Using Tracked Ultrasound

Abstract

This research proposes an electromagnetic navigation system for thoracic aortic stent-graft deployment. The system employed patient’s preoperative image (CT) to construct a 3D cardiac model based on a GPU acceleration technique. Then a preoperative planning is performed on the cardiac model. During the surgery, we employ electromagnetic tracker to trace the sensors which are embedded in the catheter and ultrasound probe, when a landmark based registration is used to map the patient’s coordinate to image coordinate in real-time. In order to “see” the real condition of inter surgical environment, an intra-operated ultrasound image is fused to the cardiac model by using a calibration panel to compute the transform from 2D ultrasound image coordinate to coordinate of sensor which was attached to the ultrasound probe in a virtual reality environment.