A planning system for robot based abdominal minimally invasive surgery

Selecting proper port positions for laparoscopic procedures is crucial to the success of the intervention. When performing minimally invasive procedures with a telemanipulator system, the positions and configurations of the robot arms are equally important. Preoperatively planning the setup can help solving these issues. For abdominal interventions the insufflation of the patient's abdomen prevents the direct use of the planned data. In this paper we present a system to plan and transfer the setup for abdominal minimally invasive procedures. Our system is composed of a preoperative planning module and an intraoperative registration and transfer module. A first version of the preoperative planning module was developed, which enables the surgeon to position the trocars and-in case of a robot based procedure-to arrange the robot system to get a configuration without possible collisions that offers good reachability and flexibility. The planned trocar positions are transferred into the operating room using projector based augmented reality techniques. The intraoperative module is used to register the patient to the preoperative data, to record the changes of the abdomen due to the insufflation and finally to project the adjusted planned trocar positions directly onto the patient's abdomen. An evaluation with a torso phantom showed acceptable accuracy.