Content Based Image Retrieval For Real-Time Registration In Image-Guided Interventions

超声成像为指导外科手术提供了重要的实时信息。术中腹腔镜超声(LUS)已广泛应用于肝脏外科，可提高肝脏肿瘤的发现、定性和定位。然而，使用LUS可能很困难，因为外科医生在履行职责时，通常需要在一个监视器上查看腹腔镜视频，然后在另一个监视器上查看超声(US)图像。此外，由于超声是二维的，而MR/CT扫描大多是三维的，因此很难将实时LUS图像与诸如磁共振(MR)或计算机断层扫描(CT)的术前图像相关联。因此，包括我们在内的不同作者已经开发了图像引导的腹腔镜手术系统来提供一个集成的计算机系统来指导外科医生，其目的是以方便和容易使用的方式提供所有可用成像数据的直观显示。然而，尽管在过去的20年里，学术界在引导技术方面取得了许多进展，但只有很小一部分人过渡到临床应用。挑战包括缺乏空间，需要无菌，要求尽可能少地与用户互动，以及剧院时间成本造成的时间限制。许多研究原型根本不符合这些标准，无法转化为临床有用的产品。通常情况下，当前登记(对齐)数据的方法通常太慢或太笨拙，无法实时使用。我提出了一项可行性研究，以建立一个新的实时配准框架，该框架可应用于腹腔镜手术、内窥镜胎儿手术、机器人辅助手术和图像引导肿瘤消融等多种应用。计算机将模拟和存储来自各种不同位置和方向的大量超声图像。然后，在手术期间，实时超声馈送将与手术前的图像、模拟数据库进行匹配。这将使术前数据能够实时对准，从而提供更容易使用的系统。

Ultrasound imaging provides important real-time information to guide surgical interventions. Intra-operative Laparoscopic UltraSound (LUS) has been widely used in hepatic surgery, and may improve the detection, characterisation and localisation of hepatic tumours. However, it can be difficult to use LUS as the surgeon is normally required to look at both the laparoscopic video on one monitor and then the UltraSound (US) images on a different monitor, while performing their duties. Furthermore it is difficult to relate live LUS images to pre-operative images such as Magnetic Resonance (MR) or Computed Tomography (CT) scans, as the ultrasound is 2 dimensional, and the MR/CT scans are mostly 3 dimensional, and both look very different to the patients anatomy.So, various authors including ourselves have developed image-guided laparoscopic surgery systems to provide an integrated computer system to guide the surgeon, where the aim is to provide an intuitive display of all the available imaging data, in a convenient and easy to use fashion. However, while many advancements in guidance technology have been developed by the academic community over the last 20 years, only a very small proportion has transitioned to clinical use. Challenges include the lack of space, the need for sterility, the requirement for as little user-interaction as possible and the time constraints imposed by the cost of theatre time. Many research prototypes simply do not meet these criteria and fail to translate to a clinically useful product.Typically, current methods of registering (aligning) data are often too slow or too awkward to be used in real-time. I propose a feasibility study to build a new framework for real-time registration that can be applied to applications as diverse as laparoscopic surgery, endoscopic fetal surgery, robot-assisted surgery and image-guided ablation of tumours.The proposed method will make use of image simulation prior to surgery. The computer will simulate and store a large quantity of ultrasound images, from a variety of different positions and orientations. Then during surgery, the live ultrasound feed will be matched to the images pre-operative, simulated, database. This will enable real-time alignment of the pre-operative data, thereby providing a much easier to use system.