Simultaneous Acquisition and Image Synthesis of Gamma Cameras and Optical Cameras for Sentinel Lymph Node Identification During Radioguided Surgery

We have developed a method that combines a small semiconductor gamma camera with an optical camera to synthesize the two respective kinds of images and help surgeons to easily identify sentinel lymph nodes in various cancer surgery. The proposed method includes some key techniques such as distortion correction of the optical camera image, distance estimation between the camera head and the object surface using a laser and the optical camera, and perspective transformation of the gamma camera image to fuse with the optical camera image. The method, along with preliminary experimental results with a prototype setup are presented here. [All rights reserved Elsevier].