3D Slicer as an image computing platform for the Quantitative Imaging Network.

The Raven-II is a platform for collaborative research on advances in surgical robotics. Seven universities have begun research using this platform. The Raven-II system has two 3-DOF spherical positioning mechanisms capable of attaching interchangeable four DOF instruments. The Raven-II software is based on open standards such as Linux and ROS to maximally facilitate software development. The mechanism is robust enough for repeated experiments and animal surgery experiments, but is not engineered to sufficient safety standards for human use. Mechanisms in place for interaction among the user community and dissemination of results include an electronic forum, an online software SVN repository, and meetings and workshops at major robotics conferences.

Raven-II: An Open Platform for Surgical Robotics Research

A variety of advanced image analysis methods have been under the development for ultrasound-guided interventions. Unfortunately, the transition from an image analysis algorithm to clinical feasibility trials as part of an intervention system requires integration of many components, such as imaging and tracking devices, data processing algorithms, and visualization software. The objective of our paper is to provide a freely available open-source software platform-PLUS: Public software Library for Ultrasound-to facilitate rapid prototyping of ultrasound-guided intervention systems for translational clinical research. PLUS provides a variety of methods for interventional tool pose and ultrasound image acquisition from a wide range of tracking and imaging devices, spatial and temporal calibration, volume reconstruction, simulated image generation, and recording and live streaming of the acquired data. This paper introduces PLUS, explains its functionality and architecture, and presents typical uses and performance in ultrasound-guided intervention systems. PLUS fulfills the essential requirements for the development of ultrasound-guided intervention systems and it aspires to become a widely used translational research prototyping platform. PLUS is freely available as open source software under BSD license and can be downloaded from http://www.plustoolkit.org.

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PLUS: open-source toolkit for ultrasound-guided intervention systems.

Due to the need for accurate navigation in minimally invasive surgery, many methods have been introduced to the operating room for tracking the position and orientation of instruments. This paper considers the subproblem of using integrated inertial and magnetic sensing to track the attitude (orientation) of surgical instruments. In this scenario, it is usually assumed that the sensor is quasi-static and the surrounding magnetic field is steady. For practical hand-held surgical instruments, perturbations exist due to intended and unintended (e.g., tremor) motion and due to distortion of the surrounding magnetic field. We consider the problem of estimating the gravity and magnetic field in the inertial sensor frame with small perturbations. The dynamics of the gravity and magnetic field is studied under perturbations, their relationships to gyroscope measurements are analyzed, and Kalman filters (KFs) are formulated to reduce these perturbations. The estimated gravity and magnetic values (outputs of the KFs) are subsequently used in an extended KF for attitude estimation. In this filter, the prediction model is given by the system dynamics, formulated using quaternions, and the observation model is given by vector analysis of the estimated gravity and magnetic field. Experiments are performed to validate the algorithms under clinically realistic motions. The complete system demonstrates an improvement in the accuracy of the attitude estimate in the presence of small perturbations, and satisfies the specified accuracy requirement of 1°.

Investigation of Attitude Tracking Using an Integrated Inertial and Magnetic Navigation System for Hand-Held Surgical Instruments

Open-source platforms for navigated image-guided interventions.

Background With increasing research on system integration for imageguided therapy (IGT), there has been a strong demand for standardized communication among devices and software to share data such as target positions, images and device status.

/pdf/openigtlink-an-open-network-protocol-for-image-guided-4opng9wurx.pdf

Jack Blevins

Papers

OpenIGTLink: an open network protocol for image-guided therapy environment