Intraoperative ultrasound to stereocamera registration using interventional photoacoustic imaging

There are approximately 6000 hospitals in the United States, of which approximately 5400 employ minimally invasive surgical robots for a variety of procedures. Furthermore, 95% of these robots require extensive registration before they can be fitted into the operating room. These "registrations" are performed by surgical navigation systems, which allow the surgical tools, the robot and the surgeon to be synchronized together-hence operating in concert. The most common surgical navigation modalities include: electromagnetic (EM) tracking and optical tracking. Currently, these navigation systems are large, intrusive, come with a steep learning curve, require sacrifices on the part of the attending medical staff, and are quite expensive (since they require several components). Recently, photoacoustic (PA) imaging has become a practical and promising new medical imaging technology. PA imaging only requires the minimal equipment standard with most modern ultrasound (US) imaging systems as well as a common laser source. In this paper, we demonstrate that given a PA imaging system, as well as a stereocamera (SC), the registration between the US image of a particular anatomy and the SC image of the same anatomy can be obtained with reliable accuracy. In our experiments, we collected data for N = 80 trials of sample 3D US and SC coordinates. We then computed the registration between the SC and the US coordinates. Upon validation, the mean error and standard deviation between the predicted sample coordinates and the corresponding ground truth coordinates were found to be 3.33 mm and 2.20 mm respectively.