Integration of model-based weighting into an ICP variant to account for measurement errors in intra-operative A-Mode ultrasound-based registration

This paper addresses error modeling in A-Mode ultrasound- (US-) based registration and integration of model-based weighting into the Random-ICP (R-ICP) algorithm. The R-ICP is a variant of the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm, and it was suggested for surface-based registration using A-Mode US in the context of skull surgery. In that application area the R-ICP could yield high accuracy even in case of a small number of data points and a very inaccurate user-interactive pre-registration. However, it cannot cope with unequal point uncertainty, which is an important drawback in the context of hip surgery: Uncertainty about the average speed of sound is an error source, whose impact on the registration accuracy increases with the thickness of the scanned soft tissue. It can, therefore, lead to considerable localization errors if a thick soft tissue layer is scanned, and it might vary a lot from data point to data point as the soft tissue thickness is inhomogeneous. The present work investigates how to account for this error source considering also other error sources such as the establishment of point correspondences. Simulation results show that registration accuracy can be substantially improved when model-based weighting is integrated into the R-ICP.