Realtime Virtual 3D Image of Kidney Using Pre-Operative CT Image for Geometry and Realtime US-Image for Tracking

Sammanfattning: In this thesis a method is presented to provide a 3D visualization of the human kidney and surrounding tissue during kidney surgery. The method takes advantage of the high detail of 3D X-Ray Computed Tomography (CT) and the high time resolution of Ultrasonography (US). By extracting the geometry from a single preoperative CT scan and animating the kidney by tracking its position in real time US images, a 3D visualization of the surgical volume can be created. The first part of the project consisted of building an imaging phantom as a simplified model of the human body around the kidney. It consists of three parts: the shell part representing surrounding tissue, the kidney part representing the kidney soft tissue and a kidney stone part embedded in the kidney part. The shell and soft tissue kidney parts was cast with a mixture of the synthetic polymer Polyvinyl Alchohol (PVA) and water. The kidney stone part was cast with epoxy glue. All three parts where designed to look like human tissue in CT and US images. The method is a pipeline of stages that starts with acquiring the CT image as a 3D matrix of intensity values. This matrix is then segmented, resulting in separate polygonal 3D models for the three phantom parts. A scan of the model is then performed using US, producing a sequence of US images. A computer program extracts easily recognizable image feature points from the images in the sequence. Knowing the spatial position and orientation of a new US image in which these features can be found again allows the position of the kidney to be calculated. The presented method is realized as a proof of concept implementation of the pipeline. The implementation displays an interactive visualization where the kidney is positioned according to a user-selected US image scanned for image features. Using the proof of concept implementation as a guide, the accuracy of the proposed method is estimated to be bounded by the acquired image data. For high resolution CT and US images, the accuracy can be in the order of a few millimeters.