Image-guided surgery is a surgical technique that uses images, such as CT, MRI and US scans, as a 3D map of the patient’s anatomy. Surgeons use this map in real-time during the procedure to guide instruments with high precision. This is similar to GPS navigation, The scans are obtained preoperative, peroperational, or intraoperative. The latter case involves real-time imaging. The 3D position and orientation of instruments (scalps, scopes, etc.) and anatomical structures (arteries, bones, tumours, etc.) are tracked using sensors that are attached to these objects.
This technique is commonly used in medical fields like neurosurgery, orthopaedics, and ENT. In fields involving movable soft tissue, navigation technology is still evolving. Technical clinicians, who will work on this, need to develop the necessary expertise to do so. For this target group, it is therefore useful to have a remotely accessible training system that allows them to experiment and to practice.
The PLUS Toolkit (Precision Ultrasound, Navigation, and Surgical Toolkit) is a software library allowing integration of different imaging modalities (CT, MRI, US. etc.) and various tracking systems for surgical navigation. However, this library is not yet fully tailored for accessing data from a repository.
Assignment:
The aim of this assignment is to implement and realise a PLUS-server that allows clients to remotely access navigational data (images and pose data) that simulates data acquisition in real-world surgery.
- As a bare-bone version, built a PLUS-server that is able to grasp images from an USB camera using the OpenCV facility that the PLUS library is offering.
- Built a simple repository consisting of a video showing a phantom that is probed with a stylus. The position information of both phantom and stylus are recorded. For this step, data (video and position information) is already available, but is not organised such that it is accessible from a PLUS-sever.
- Finally, design a PLUS-server that enables delivering a time sequence of synchronised video frames and pose data accessible from a remote client.
- Clinical Use-case: Set up a repository containing laparoscopic video footage of a static transluminal anatomical region (e.g., the bladder), along with synchronized pose data from the laparoscope. The PLUS-server should stream this synchronized data to a remote client that reconstructs a 3D model of the cavity. For the purpose of this assignment, the reconstruction software can be assumed to be already available and integrated locally on the client side.
Supervision:
Dr. F.J. Siepel (f.j.siepel@utwente.nl), dr. F. Van der Heijden
References:
- Lasso, T. Heffter, A. Rankin, C. Pinter, T. Ungi and G. Fichtinger, “PLUS: Open-Source Toolkit for Ultrasound-Guided Intervention Systems,” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. 61, pp. 2527-2537, 2014.
- Ungi, A. Lasso and G. Fichtinger, “Open-source platforms for navigated image-guided interventions,” Medical Image Analysis, vol. 33, pp. 181-186, 2016.