Endoscopic tracking for use in interactive, Image-Guided Surgery

In minimally invasive surgery (MIS), endoscopes are used in real-time to enhance visualization and minimize invasion of healthy tissue. Unfortunately, the field of view provided by the scope is limited. In interactive image guided surgery (IIGS), the display of present surgical position on preoperative tomographic images enhances the surgeons field of view and provides knowledge of surgical anatomy. However, changes in the anatomy during surgery are not realized by the current IIGS techniques. This manuscript details the initial experiments conducted to merge the strengths of MIS with IIGS. This includes: 1) developing a technique for accurately tracking an endoscope in physical space and 2) determining a transformation to map endoscopic image space into physical (patient) space.