Our goal was to improve image guidance during minimally invasive image guided therapy by developing an intraoperative segmentation and nonrigid registration algorithm. The algorithm was designed to allow for improved navigation and quantitative monitoring of treatment progress in order to reduce the time required in the operating room and to improve outcomes. The algorithm has been applied to intraoperative images from cryotherapy of the liver and from surgery of the brain. Empirically the algorithm has been found to be robust with respect to imaging characteristics such as noise and intensity inhomogeneity and robust with respect to parameter selection. Serial and parallel implementations of the algorithm are sufficiently fast to be practical in the operating room. The contributions of this work are an algorithm for intraoperative segmentation and intraoperative registration, a method for quantitative monitoring of cryotherapy from real-time imaging, quantitative monitoring of brain t...
Simon K. Warfield, Arya Nabavi, Torsten Butz, Kema