Comparison study of intraoperative surface acquisition methods on registration accuracy for soft-tissue surgical navigation.

Overview

PURPOSE: To study the difference between rigid registration and nonrigid registration using two forms of digitization (contact and noncontact) in human in vivo liver surgery. APPROACH: n RESULTS: 24.6 CONCLUSION: The first use of a sterile-field amenable Conoprobe surface acquisition strategy in the OR is reported for open liver surgery. Under clinical conditions, the nonrigid registration significantly outperformed standard-of-care rigid registration, and acquisition by contact-based stylus and noncontact-based Conoprobe produced similar registration results. The accuracy benefits of noncontact surface acquisition with a Conoprobe are likely obscured by inferior data coverage and intrinsic noise within acquisition systems.