Automatic registration for percutaneous vertebral body tracking

The registration of cross-sectional medical images with patient anatomy is an important problem in image-guided surgery. Current registration methods such as paired-point matching can be tedious and require large incisions. Improved methods of registration for percutaneous spine procedures could potentially improve the accuracy of minimally invasive spine procedures. In this poster, we will describe a combination of hardware and software for the automatic registration of a vertebral body with cross-sectional medical images. The technique is based on a fiducial carrier attached directly to the spinous process and does not require the user to identify anatomical landmarks.