Computer assisted system for precise lung surgery based on medical image computing and mixed reality

Abstract

The key of a surgical treatment for the lung cancer is to remove the infected part with the least excision and to retain most of the healthy lung tissue. The traditional computer surgery assisted system show that the patient’s CT images or three-dimensional structure in the PC screen. This assisted system is not a real three-dimensional system and can’t display well the position of pulmonary vessels and trachea of the patients to surgeon. To solve the problem, a computer assisted system for precise lung surgery for precise surgery based on medical image and VR is developed in this paper. Firstly, the regional growth and filling algorithm is designed to segment lung trachea and lung vessels. Then, the reference edge grid algorithm is used to construct the model of the segmentation trachea and lung vessels. And the models are saved as an identifiable STL type file. Finally, according to the system analysis for the specific system function, the computer assisted system is implemented to display the three-dimensional pulmonary vessels and trachea on the mixed reality device. The surgeons can observe and interface precisely the real three-dimensional lung structure of the patient to help them operate accurately the lung surgery.