Image Guidance In Robot-assisted Surgery

Image guidance in robot-assisted MIS

Various studies have demonstrated the potential benefits of image guidance in robot-assisted surgery and therapy. One of the most challenging applications of image guidance is beating heart tracking in order to automatically synchronize the motions of a surgical robot to the motions of the heart during off-pump cardiac surgery, which has strong advantages over on-pump arrested heart surgery. For the above application, I am developing algorithms that use three-dimensional (2D + time) and four-dimensional (3D + time) cardiac ultrasound images for semi-automatic or fully-automatic real-time segmentation and tracking of heart structures (e.g., mitral valve annulus, atrial septal defect, etc.) that require surgical intervention.