In vivo and in situ image guidance and modelling in robotic assisted surgery

Abstract

The increase in the use of robotic assisted surgery has provided benefits to both the patient and the surgeon. There are possibilities for training and surgical planning and guidance within this framework but work is needed for this to reach a patient-specific level. Medical images obtained prior to surgery are used clinically to plan operations and there has been much research in their use to build models, giving further knowledge of tissue and organ structures. The incorporation of this data into the surgical environment is a recent development, assisting the surgeon with orientation information, but motion due to respiration or changes to morphology due to intervention begets a need for the incorporation of real-time imaging into the modelling. The current work on pre-operative and intra-operative imaging and modelling methods for robotic assisted surgery has to be reviewed and then the Image Constrained Biomechanical Modelling has to be introduced, whereby patient-specific biomechanical modelling is based on the underlying medical images, reducing the computational complexity involved with traditional biomechani-cal modelling. This article concludes with a discussion of the possible and promising future directions of this work.