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. A method of determining six POSE orientation parameters of a medical catheter, the method comprising:
steering the medical catheter to an anatomical position in a patient, the catheter having a tip, the tip including a five degree of freedom electromagnetic sensor, the five degree of freedom electromagnetic sensor providing five POSE parameters of the tip;
forming a 3D navigation model representative of a lung anatomy of the patient from CT data, the lung anatomy including at least the anatomical position;
presenting an image of the anatomical position within the 3D navigation model of the lung anatomy on a user display;
manually activating a control mechanism of the medical catheter to repeatedly move the tip in an arc constrained to a plane at the anatomical position;
applying PCA analysis of a time window of the five degree of freedom sensor locations during the movement of the tip to detect a PCA signature;
analyzing the PCA signature to determine the sixth POSE orientation parameter of the tip.
2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:
correlating the location and orientation of the tip at the anatomical position with one or more patient images acquired prior to repeatedly moving the tip.
3. The method of claim 2 , wherein orientation and location determination comprise applying a deformation vector field.
4. The method of claim 3 , wherein the one or more patient images are derived from an imaging device in conjunction with a patient tracking device disposed at an external region of the patient.
5. The method of claim 3 , wherein the one or more patient images are derived from an imaging device in conjunction with a plurality of patient tracking devices, each of the plurality of patient tracking devices positioned at a different external location of the patient.
6. The method of claim 1 , wherein the anatomical position is a branching point of a bronchial tree.
7. The method of claim 1 , wherein the tip has a range of motion of 1 cm to 2 cm.