Navigation with local sensors in handheld 3D ultrasound: initial in-vivo experience

Handheld ultrasound is useful for intra-operative imaging, but requires additional tracking hardware to be useful in navigated intervention settings, such as biopsies, ablation therapy, injections etc. Unlike common probe-andneedle tracking approaches involving global or local tracking, we propose to use a bracket with a combination of very low-cost local sensors - cameras with projectors, optical mice and accelerometers - to reconstruct patient surfaces, needle poses, and the probe trajectory with multiple degrees of freedom, but no global tracking overhead. We report our experiences from a rst series of benchtop and in-vivo human volunteer experiments.