Electromagnetic Tracking of Endo-vascular Surgical Tools for Computer Assisted Surgery

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Endovascular surgery is becoming widely deployed for many critical procedures, replacing invasive medical operations with long recovery times. However, there are still many challenges in improving the accuracy, efficiency and safety of its usage, as well as reducing surgery time; namely, unnecessary exposure to radiation, manual navigation of surgical tools, lack of 3D visualization, and lack of intelligent planning and automatic tracking of the end-effector. Thus, our goal is to develop hardware together with software components of a computer assisted surgery system to alleviate the abovementioned problems in a research environment using a phantom instead of any human experiments to demonstrate a proof-of-concept system. There are three specific objectives in this project: (i) to reduce the need for a surgeon to be physically next to a patient during endovascular surgery; (ii) to overcome the difficulties encountered in manual navigation; and, (iii) to improve the speed and experience of performing such surgeries. To achieve (i) we will develop an electro-mechanical system to accurately guide mechanically controlled surgical tools from a close distance, and a 3D visualization interface to assist the monitoring and controlling process; for (ii) we will replace the current manually operated surgical tools with an "intelligent wire" equipped with an electromagnetic tracker at the tip, which is controlled by the electro-mechanical system; for (iii) we will segment 3D medical images to extract precise shapes of blood vessels, following which we will perform automatic path planning for the electromagnetic tracker.