Automatic Real-Time Space Registration Application for Simulating Dental and Maxillofacial Surgery

Real-time surgical navigation systems are important for preoperative planning and intraoperative navigation. Automatic preoperative multimodal data registration and postoperative spatial registration are extremely crucial in such surgical navigation systems. However, existing automatic multimodal data registration methods have extremely limited application scope due to the lack of accuracy and speed. In addition, the registration results obtained by existing methods are practically lacking and are rarely applied in clinics. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a novel real-time teeth registration algorithm with computed tomography (CT) data and optical tracking scanning data. The proposed method is based on the weighted iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm with 3 improvements: (1) the multilayer spherical point set is generated inside the laser scanning marker sphere, (2) the weight decreases from inside to outside layer by layer, and (3) the weight of the voxel center point set is combined with the CT data of the marker sphere. Specifically, the proposed iCP registration method can overcome the limitation of surface point set registration and tackle the problem of high surface deformity of laser scanning marker spheres. For the registration result of CT and scanning data, the authors employ the real-time spatial registration algorithm based on optical tracking to complete the navigation of the simulated surgical instruments on the multimodal fusion image. The experimental results show that the proposed ICP algorithm reduces the mean square error by 1 order of magnitude and that our method has strong practical value.