Otologic surgery is undertaken to treat ailments of the ear including persistent infections, hearing loss, vertigo, and cancer. Typically performed on healthy patients in outpatient facilities, the application of image-guided surgery has been limited because accurate (<1mm), non-invasive fiducial systems for otologic surgery are not available. We have developed such a system, which repeatably attaches to a subject via a dental bite block [1]. In a previous report, ex-vivo validation indicated that mean target registration error ± standard deviation for 234 targets within the surgical field was 0.73±0.23mm with a root mean square of 0.77mm [2,3]. In an effort to further understand the limitations of our system, we undertook, and report herein, a detailed error analysis to determine what portion of the error is attributable to the inaccuracies in relocation fit of the fiducial frame to a subject’s dentition. Our analysis shows that the root-mean-square error due to relocation alon...
Robert F. Labadie, Michael Fenlon, Hakan Cvikalp,