Automatic Correction of Registration Errors in Surgical Navigation Systems

surgical navigation systems are used widely among all fields of modern medicine, including, but not limited to ENTand maxillofacial surgery. As a fundamental prerequisite for image-guided surgery, intraoperative registration, which maps image to patient coordinates, has been subject to many studies and developments. Medical scans such as Magnetic Resonance (MR) and computed tomography (CT) are currently common diagnostic tools in surgical applications. Typically information contained in these medical scans is neither in the coordinate system of the patient as positioned in the world, nor does it reflect the viewpoint of the surgeon during an operation. Any correspondences between the medical images and the actual patient environment have to be drawn mentally by the surgeon during the procedure. The approach of medical image registration and tracking seeks to compute these correspondences automatically and then directly augment the real operating environment with the information contained in medical scans. Such an environment provides the surgeon with an enhanced ability to plan, navigate and localize throughout a surgical procedure.