Image Guided Microscopic Surgery System Using Mutual-Information Based Registraion

We have developed an image guided microscopic surgery system for the navigation of surgical procedures that can overlay renderings of anatomical structures that are otherwise invisible. A new histogram-based mutual information maximization technique was applied for alignment of the scope view and three-dimensional computer graphics model. This technique doesn’t require any pre-processing nor marker setting but is directly applied to the microscope view and the graphics rendering. Therefore, any special set up in image scanning or preoperative preparation is not necessary. Graphics technique were implemented to compute three-dimensional scene information by using a graphics accelerator, increasing the algorithm’s performance significantly. Experiments are presented that demonstrate the approach registering a plastic skull to its three-dimensional reconstruction model generated from a CT scan. The tracking performance in the experiments were nearly real-time.