A novel method and system for stereotactic surgical procedures

With the development of digital imaging technology, image-guided surgery (IGS) or surgical navigation has become one of the most rapidly developed techniques in minimally invasive surgery (MIS) in the past twenty years [1-11]. In conventional surgical navigation, the display used for the surgical navigation system is often placed in a non-sterile field away from the surgeon. This forces the surgeon to take extra steps to match guidance information on the display with the actual anatomy of the patient. This hand-eye coordination problem has been a big challenge. Recently, augmented reality (AR) technologies have been widely employed in IGS [12], e.g. head-mounted display (HMD) [13-14]. This system still has the problem of motion parallax lag and lacks multi-observers' field of vision. Another AR technology called image overlay [15-17] is emerging rapidly. With image overlay, computer generated anatomical models of lesion areas or the 3D structures reconstructed from medical images (computer tomography/magnetic resonance imaging, CT/MRI) are projected onto the patients' skin and registered with actual lesion areas precisely. Even this technology suffers from serious shortcomings. First, the direct projection onto the skin surface cannot produce a 3D image. Second, uneven skin surface leads to large distortions. Third, projected images do not match actual lesion areas. Additionally, these systems still suffer the problems of a lag for motion parallax, lack of natural view for multiple observers and visual fatigue [18]. The semi-transparent mirror technology has also been used in surgical navigation [19-21], but it is complex to operate.