Abstract:
Precise positioning of an ablation probe in soft abdominal organs requires taking the respiration effects into account. Fast and reliable registration of a virtual abdominal organ with intra-operational imaging data remains a challenge in image-guided and Virtual Reality (VR) aided surgeries. In this paper we present a Host Mesh Fitting (HMF) algorithm to imitate the deformation of a torso due to aspiration effects. Displacements of the torso mesh are driven by virtual fiducial markers placed on the abdominal surface, which consequently deform abdominal organs in an implicit manner and with a small computational cost. In order to test the HMF algorithm a gelatine phantom was made with its internal channels detectable from ultrasonic imaging. Deformation of the channels due to a compression force was reproduced from the warping of the host mesh. After coupling with a fiducial marker tracking system the HMF algorithm can be used to model the torso deformation due to respiration effects.