Image guided medialization laryngoplasty

Techniques that originate in computer graphics and computer vision have found prominent applications in the medical domain. In this paper, we have seamlessly developed techniques from computer graphics and computer vision together with domain knowledge from medicine to develop an image guided surgical system for medialization laryngoplasty. The technical focus of this paper is to register the preoperative radiological data to the intraoperative anatomical structure of the patient. With careful analysis of the real-world surgical environment, we have developed an ICP-based partial shape matching algorithm to register the partially visible anatomical structure to the preoperative CT data. We extracted distinguishable features from the human thyroid cartilage surface and applied image space template matching to find the initial guess for the shape matching. The experimental result shows that our feature-based partial shape matching method has better performance and robustness compared with original ICP-based shape matching method. Although this paper concentrates on the medialization laryngoplasty procedure, its generality makes our methods ideal for future applications in other image guided surgical areas.