Multi modality fusion imaging technique for laparoscopic surgery guiding

In this study, a multi modality fusion imaging technique was proposed for guiding a new laparoscopic surgery method. This new method was evaluated during a phantom experiment. An advantage of this new laparoscopic surgery method is that the internal structures can be imaged during surgery using ultrasonic diagnostic equipment. This method can display the internal organ structure by overlaying a three dimensional (3-D) ultrasonic image over a 3-D laparoscopic image. The registration of the 3-D images is performed by registering the surface of the target organ which is found in the two 3-D images. In the 3-D laparoscopic image, the surface shape of the target organ is reconstructed from two 2-D laparoscopic images. In the 3-D ultrasonic image, the internal structure and the surface shape of the target organ are directly reconstructed from volumetric ultrasonic image acquired by US diagnostic equipment. Results obtained using the proposed method on tissue mimicking phantoms led to a registration accuracy of 9.72+/-3.79 mm. The total processing time was 3.2 min on a personal computer (Xeon processor, 3-GHz CPU). The structural information obtained from our method permit to visualize target organs during laparoscopic surgery.