A navigation system for brain surgery using computer vision technology

Abstract

In this paper, a surgical navigation system based on stereo-vision has been proposed. With the help of a projector, surface point data of a patient are firstly captured from two cameras by using the stereo-vision technique. Next, these point data is then registered by another surface point data obtained from the patient's pre-stored CT images using Feature-added ICP algorithm. For surgical navigation, a stereo-vision-based tracker is also designed in this system. In this manner, the anatomical information obtained from CT is fused on the images captured by the cameras and the tracker can be mounted to any surgical device for further surgical applications. Compared to conventional image guided surgeries, the proposed system has the advantage of fusing the visual and anatomical information such that it is more accurate and convenient. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.