Automatic Patient Registration for Port Placement

Abstract. Optimal port placement is a delicate issue in minimally in-vasive endoscopic surgery, particularly in robotically assisted surgery. A good choice of the instruments ’ and endoscope’s ports can avoid time-consuming consecutive new port placement. We present a novel method to intuitively and precisely plan the port placement. The patient is reg-istered to its pre-operative CT by just moving the endoscope around fiducials, which are attached to the patient’s thorax and are visible in its CT. Their 3D positions are automatically reconstructed. Without prior time-consuming segmentation, the pre-operative CT volume is directly rendered with respect to the endoscope or instruments. This enables the simulation of a camera flight through the patient’s interior along the instruments ’ axes to easily validate possible ports.