Surgical Tracking, Registration, and Navigation Characterization for Image-guided Renal Interventions

Most image-guided interventions rely on surgical tracking and image/model to patient registration to establish a spatial relationship between the patient and the pre- and intraprocedural images, by using surgical tracking and localization systems. In this work, we characterize the tracking, registration and navigation accuracy using two different surgical localization systems - the NDI Polaris Spectra optical tracking system and the NDI Aurora electromagnetic tracking system - in the context of an image-guided renal intervention, using a 3D printed life-size model of a patient-specific kidney phantom generated from a CT image. Our results reported a 0.05 mm fiducial localization error, 0.70 mm fiducial registration error, and 0.78 mm target registration error, and 0.63 mm overall navigation error using the optical tracking, and 0.12 mm fiducial localization error, 0.78 mm fiducial registration error, 0.93 mm target registration error and 0.89 mm overall navigation error using electromagnetic tracking. Additionally, our study also showed similarity between the overall navigation accuracy using optical (0.63 mm RMS error) or electromagnetic tracking (0.89 mm RMS error) and the overall navigation accuracy achieved using direct visualization of the surgical scene (0.68 mm and 1.06 RMS error respectively), which serves as a baseline control metric.