Evaluation of the application accuracy of 3D-navigation through measurements and prediction

Abstract

Details of commercially available navigation systems are not open to the public. With the development of our open source 3D-navigation system, open4Dnav, new possibilities in evaluating and testing new components and parameters can be achieved. To determine the application accuracy of open4Dnav a large number of measurements were evaluated. The registration of a patient to the system is a rigid body registration that is subject to well-known errors, in principle. The target registration error (TRE) and the fiducial registration error (FRE) were used for estimating the accuracy of open4Dnav. Besides measuring the TRE after the registration, it is possible to predict this value with a widely accepted model. The large amount of data we have collected allowed, for the first time, to perform a detailed assessment of a potential discrepancy between the observed and the predicted error measurements. Furthermore, we were able to perform an in-depth analysis of the spatial application error of open4Dnav in detail.