Section: New Results

Non-Rigid Augmented Reality for Hepatic Surgery

Hepatic resection and tumors removal approaches remains a major challenge. Despite the use of new minimally invasive techniques which has several advantages such as precision, decreased blood loss, quicker healing time and less pain, the lack of informations due to poor depth perception and direct contact lost leads the surgeons and the research groups to use Augmented Reality to overcome these issues. Augmented Reality is the visual overlay of computers-generated images over real world images. This technique can be used to overlay vessels, tumors and cutting planes performed on the pre-operative data (3D reconstruction from CT or MR scan) onto the laparoscopic video per-operatively. However, current techniques are limited to a rigid registration of the pre-operative liver anatomy onto the intra-operative image, and often this registration is not performed automatically. Our objective is to develop a real-time, non-rigid registration and tracking of the intra and pre-operative liver data.

Figure 5. Non-rigid augmentation of a vascular network of a porcine liver : (left) The liver tracking. (Middle) Biomechanical model of the liver under deformation. (Right) Overlaid vascular network.