APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR FOUR DIMENSIONAL SOFT TISSUE NAVIGATION IN ENDOSCOPIC APPLICATIONS
A surgical instrument navigation system is provided that visually simulates a virtual volumetric scene of a body cavity of a patient from a point of view of a surgical instrument residing in the cavity of the patient. The surgical instrument navigation system includes: a surgical instrument; an imaging device which is operable to capture scan data representative of an internal region of interest within a given patient; a tracking subsystem that employs electro-magnetic sensing to capture in real-time position data indicative of the position of the surgical instrument; a data processor which is operable to render a volumetric, perspective image of the internal region of interest from a point of view of the surgical instrument; and a display which is operable to display the volumetric perspective image of the patient.
1 .- 5 . (canceled)
6 . A method of using a guidewire or other navigated instrument with one to one rotation to continuously align a virtual display view to be consistent with an actual bronchoscopic video view.
7 . A method of using a video input of the bronchoscope to adjust the virtual fly-through view to be consistent with a user's normal perspective.
8 . The method of claim 7 wherein video processing and matching techniques can be used between the real-time video and the virtual image to align.
9 . A method of using bronchoscopic video to provide angular information at a current location to provide targeting or directional cues to the user.
10 . The method of claim 9 wherein the angular information is derived from the location of patient anatomy in the image and the relative size of each within the image.
11 . A system or apparatus comprising one or more components for carrying out one or more elements of the method of claim 6 .
12 . A non-transitory processor-readable medium storing code representing instructions to cause a processor to perform a process, the code comprising code to carry out one or more elements of the method of claim 6 .