Self-registration of Ultrasound Imaging Device to Navigation System Using Surgical Instrument Kinematics in Minimally Invasive Procedure

This work presents an intraoperative method for registration of 3D ultrasound images to surgical navigation systems. Unlike conventional methods that rely on pre-calibration of ultrasound probe in a laboratory environment using a calibration rig, the proposed method is designed to self-register with a tracking system in an operating room. It exploits intraoperative motion of the surgical instrument to compute the registration function instead of using the known geometry of a phantom structure. To reduce estimation errors arising from poor image quality and uncertainty of image-based position estimations, the pivotal constraint associated with minimally invasive surgeries is imposed as a positional correspondence between the imaging and tracking system. We demonstrated the registration of an ultrasound imaging device to an optical tracker and evaluated the accuracy in a water tank setup. This self-registration framework has potential contribution in the unification of ultrasound image-guidance and tracker-based surgical navigation systems. The ultimate goal is to combine ultrasound image-guidance and tracking systems as an integrated surgical navigation system.