Fast intra-operative nonlinear registration of 3D-CT to tracked, selected 2D-ultrasound slices

In navigated liver surgery it is an important task to align intra-operative data to pre-operative planning data. This work describes a method to register pre-operative 3D-CT-data to tracked intra-operative 2D US-slices. Instead of reconstructing a 3D-volume out of the two-dimensional US-slice sequence we directly apply the registration scheme to the 2D-slices. The advantage of this approach is manyfold. We circumvent the time consuming compounding process, we use only known information, and the complexity of the scheme reduces drastically. As the liver is a non-rigid organ, we apply non-linear techniques to take care of deformations occurring during the intervention. During the surgery, computing time is a crucial issue. As the complexity of the scheme is proportional to the number of acquired slices, we devise a scheme which starts out by selecting a few "key-slices" to be used in the non-linear registration scheme. This step is followed by multi-level/multi-scale strategies and fast optimization techniques. In this abstract we briefly describe the new method and show first convincing results.