Section: New Results

Augmented Reality for Vascular Surgery

Participants : Raffaella Trivisonne, Igor Peterlik, Hadrien Courtecuisse, Stéphane Cotin.

Significant changes have taken place over the past 20 years in medicine with the development of minimally invasive procedures. While surgery evolved towards laparoscopy for instance, interventional radiology has become another alternative for many pathologies. Regarding catheter-based interventions, the lack of depth perception in projective grey-scale images, and the extensive use of X-ray imaging to visualize the instrument and the anatomy through which it must be inserted, are among the main issues. We propose to address these different problems by developing an advanced navigation system which relies on a combination of real-time simulation and information extracted from intra-operative images to assess the current position of the catheter. Such a method would have direct applications in endovascular procedures allowing for an enhanced view of the operating field, both in term of 3D perception and quality of the images. Our approach combines advanced modeling of the device, 2D-3D registration and constraint-based simulation.

We have developed a method [18] based on constraint-based simulation allowing for the enhancement of fluoroscopic images with a 3D real-time catheter insertion and 3D vessel visualization. Our method relies mainly on image features, without the need of any information about the surrounding 3D vasculature, nor does it require any tracking device (Figure 9).

Figure 9. A 3D catheter reconstruction (red) and the real catheter (blue).