Image-guided surgery.

Recent advances in image guided surgery are changing the manner in which surgeons are able to execute difficult procedures. By building detailed, patient-specific models of anatomy, and augmenting those models with other information, such as functional properties, the surgeon can better plan her procedure to optimally extract target tissue while avoiding nearby critical structures. By registering these models with the actual patient position in the operating theatre, one can provide the surgeon with augmented reality visualizations, in which hidden tissue is displayed in exact alignment with a live view of the patient. By tracking surgical instruments relative to the patient and the registered model, real-time feedback is provided about the position of the instrument and its relationship to nearby tissue. A central aspect of IGS is creating accurate, detailed, patient-specific models from medical imagery. In this paper, we briefly outline an overall approach to image guided surgery, and present several examples of current methods for model building.