Percutaneous renal puncture: requirements and preliminary results

This paper introduces the principles of computer assisted percutaneous renal puncture, that would provide the surgeon with an accurate pre-operative 3D planning on CT images and, after a rigid registration with space-localized echographic data, would help him to perform the puncture through an intuitive 2D/3D interface. The whole development stage relied on both CT and US images of a healthy subject. We carried out millimetric registrations on real data, then guidance experiments on a kidney phantom showed encouraging results.