title: Pose-independent surface matching for intra-operative soft-tissue marker-less registration.
abstract: One of the main challenges in computer-assisted soft tissue surgery is the registration of multi-modal patient-specific data for enhancing the surgeon's navigation capabilities by observing beyond exposed tissue surfaces. A new approach to marker-less guidance involves capturing the intra-operative patient anatomy with a range image device and doing a shape-based registration. However, as the target organ is only partially visible, typically does not provide salient features and underlies severe non-rigid deformations, surface matching in this context is extremely challenging. Furthermore, the intra-operatively acquired surface data may be subject to severe systematic errors and noise. To address these issues, we propose a new approach to establishing surface correspondences, which can be used to initialize fine surface matching algorithms in the context of intra-operative shape-based registration. Our method does not require any prior knowledge on the relative poses of the input surfaces to each other, does not rely on the detection of prominent surface features, is robust to noise and can be used for overlapping surfaces. It takes into account (1) similarity of feature descriptors, (2) compatibility of multiple correspondence pairs, as well as (3) the spatial configuration of the entire correspondence set. We evaluate the algorithm on time-of-flight (ToF) data from porcine livers in a respiratory liver motion simulator. In all our experiments the alignment computed from the established surface correspondences yields a registration error below 1cm and is thus well suited for initializing fine surface matching algorithms for intra-operative soft-tissue registration.
authors.affiliation: SENAI Institute of Innovation in Embedded Systems, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil. Electronic address: thiago.ramos@sc.senai.br.
authors.forename: Thiago Ramos
authors.initials: TR
authors.lastname: dos Santos
authors.affiliation: Junior Group Computer-assisted Interventions, Div. Medical & Biological Informatics, German Cancer Research Center - DKFZ, Heidelberg, Germany.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Seitel
authors.affiliation: Junior Group Computer-assisted Interventions, Div. Medical & Biological Informatics, German Cancer Research Center - DKFZ, Heidelberg, Germany.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kilgus
authors.affiliation: Institute for Anthropomatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany.
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Suwelack
authors.affiliation: Surgical Dept., University Hospital, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany.
authors.forename: Anna-Laura
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Wekerle
authors.affiliation: Surgical Dept., University Hospital, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany.
authors.forename: Hannes
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kenngott
authors.affiliation: Institute for Anthropomatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany.
authors.forename: Stefanie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Speidel
authors.affiliation: Dept. of Radiology, German Cancer Research Center - DKFZ, Heidelberg, Germany.
authors.forename: Heinz-Peter
authors.initials: HP
authors.lastname: Schlemmer
authors.affiliation: Div. Medical & Biological Informatics, German Cancer Research Center - DKFZ, Heidelberg, Germany.
authors.forename: Hans-Peter
authors.initials: HP
authors.lastname: Meinzer
authors.affiliation: Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, Erlangen, Germany.
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Heimann
authors.affiliation: Junior Group Computer-assisted Interventions, Div. Medical & Biological Informatics, German Cancer Research Center - DKFZ, Heidelberg, Germany.
authors.forename: Lena
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Maier-Hein
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D006801:Humans; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods; D007432:Intraoperative Period; D008099:Liver / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging; D011857:Radiographic Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D025321:Surgery, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D013552:Swine
keywords: Computer-assisted surgery; Intra-operative registration; Surface matching; Time-of-flight camera