A Complete Augmented Reality Guidance System for Liver Punctures: First Clinical Evaluation

We provided in an augmented reality guidance system for liver punctures, which has been validated on a static abdominal phantom. In this paper, we report the first in vivo experiments. We developed a strictly passive protocol to directly evaluate our system on patients. We show that the system algorithms work efficiently and we highlight the clinical constraints that we had to overcome (small operative field, weight and sterility of the tracked marker attached to the needle...). Finally, we investigate to what extent breathing motion can be neglected for free breathing patient. Results show that the guiding accuracy, close to 1 cm, is sufficient for large targets only (above 3 cm of diameter) when the breathing motion is neglected. In the near future, we aim at validating our system on smaller targets using a respiratory gating technique.