Biomechanically driven registration of pre- to intra-operative 3D images for laparoscopic surgery

Minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery is widely used for the treatment of cancer and other diseases. During the procedure, gas insufflation is used to create space for laparoscopic tools and operation. Insufflation causes the organs and abdominal wall to deform significantly. Due to this large deformation, the benefit of surgical plans, which are typically based on pre-operative images, is limited for real time navigation. In some recent work, intra-operative images, such as cone-beam CT or interventional CT, are introduced to provide updated volumetric information after insufflation. Other works in this area have focused on simulation of gas insufflation and exploited only the pre-operative images to estimate deformation. This paper proposes a novel registration method for pre- and intra-operative 3D image fusion for laparoscopic surgery. In this approach, the deformation of pre-operative images is driven by a biomechanical model of the insufflation process. The proposed method was validated by five synthetic data sets generated from clinical images and three pairs of in vivo CT scans acquired from two pigs, before and after insufflation. The results show the proposed method achieved high accuracy for both the synthetic and real insufflation data.