Deformable modelling of the cervical spine for neurosurgical navigation

Abstract Surgical intervention at the cervical spine is one of the most difficult interventions in surgery. Special care must be taken to the sensitive anatomy around, e.g., the trachea, oesophagus, arteries and spinal nerves. This paper presents a novel approach in neurosurgical navigation which takes into account these structures in the cervical region by calculating continuously the soft tissue's deformation during the neurological intervention. We use a fast finite element model (FFEM) for the functional modelling of the cervical spine and a graphical deformation algorithm for the surrounding.

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