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

血管内手术被广泛应用于许多关键手术，取代了恢复时间长的侵入性医疗手术。然而，在提高其使用的准确性、效率和安全性以及缩短手术时间方面仍存在许多挑战；即不必要的辐射暴露、手术工具的手动导航、缺乏三维可视化、缺乏末端执行器的智能规划和自动跟踪。因此，我们的目标是开发一个计算机辅助手术系统的硬件和软件组件，以缓解上述问题，在研究环境中使用一个幻影代替任何人体实验来演示概念验证系统。该项目有三个具体目标：(i)减少外科医生在血管内手术过程中在患者身边的需要；（二）克服人工导航遇到的困难；（三）提高此类手术的速度和经验。为了实现(i)，我们将开发一个机电系统，在近距离精确引导机械控制的手术工具，以及一个3D可视化界面，以协助监测和控制过程；对于（ii），我们将用一种“智能导线”取代目前人工操作的手术工具，该“智能导线”的尖端配备了由机电系统控制的电磁跟踪器；对于（iii），我们将分割3D医学图像以提取血管的精确形状，随后我们将对电磁跟踪器进行自动路径规划。

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.