A novel ultrasound-based registration approach for image-guided laparoscopic ablation of liver lesions

In this work we present a novel registration approach for laparoscopic liver surgery. The proposed method reconstructs in real-time an intraoperative volume of the underlying vessels through an ultrasound sweep process and register to a preoperative CT model. An existing IGS system for open liver procedure was adapted with suitable instrument tracking for laparoscopic equipment. Registration accuracy was evaluated on a realistic phantom by computing the target registration error (TRE) at five tumours. The proposed registration method achieved an average TRE of 8.5mm in the left lobe and 9.7 mm in the right lobe. The average time required for performing the registration was 12 minutes. We believe that the proposed method is a significant step towards the use of navigation systems in the clinical routine.