A unifying framework for accuracy analysis in image-guided surgery

This paper presents a unifying framework for accuracy analysis in Image-Guided Surgery (IGS). It allows to represent IGS applications as a sequence of procedural or workflow steps for which a number of options exist which characterize the system under consideration. The ability to explicitely model the error contribution for each of the options in this framework of steps lays the foundation to a comparative analysis of different systems in terms of overall application error resulting from an error propagation analysis. The framework approach is applied to a number of system approaches from literature. One finding is that for IGS, the important step of image distortion correction for CT and MRI has been consistently neglected.