A miniature patient‐mount navigation system for assisting needle placement in CT‐guided intervention

BACKGROUND: CT-guided intervention is routinely performed in an iterative fashion that often leads to lengthy operation and high X-ray exposure to patients. To streamline the workflow, we develop a patient-mount navigation system for assisting needle placement in CT-guided interventions. METHODS: The system comprises three components, a miniature patient-mount tracking unit, an auto-registered reference-frame unit and an intuitive image-processing unit. The system is operated like a virtual biplane fluoroscopy with augmented CT reconstructed images to streamline the conventional CT-guided intervention workflow. Surgery efficiency and safety can be increased, while radiation for patients and surgeons can be reduced. Two preclinical validations were conducted to evaluate the technical applicability and accuracy of the system. RESULTS: The results of the rigid physical phantom test showed a machine position error of 1.6 mm and a tilting error of 1.5°. The results of the deformable porcine phantom test showed the operation position error to be 3.6 mm and tilting error to be 2.9°. CONCLUSIONS: We concluded that the accuracy of our system is within the comparable range of the existing navigation systems.