Ge Jin, DSc. and James Hahn, Ph.D.
Department of Computer Science
The George Washington University

Abstract:
Over the last two decades, image-guided technology has revolutionized routine surgical procedures in the operating theater. The motivation behind this research is to provide image guidance to the medialization laryngoplasty, a surgical procedure designed to improve the voice function of the patient with vocal fold paresis and paralysis. Currently, the surgeon relies on experience and intuition to place the implant in the desired location, thus it is subject to a significant level of uncertainty. An intraoperative image-guided system will help the surgeon to accurately place the implant at the desired location. One of the fundamental challenges in image guided system is to accurately register the preoperative radiological data to the intraoperative anatomical structure of the patient. We introduce a surface based registration method to register the preoperative 3D CT data to the intraoperative surface of larynx. To accurately model the exposed surface area, a structured light based stereo vision technique is used for the surface reconstruction. We combined the gray code and multi-line shifting patterns to reconstruct the intraoperative surface of the larynx. To register the point clouds from the intraoperative stage to the preoperative 3D CT data, an anatomical feature based ICP method is proposed to quickly register the two surfaces. The proposed approach is capable of registering the laryngeal cartilage surface with no damage to the anatomical structure. We used computer controlled machine vision cameras, LCD projector and rapid 3D printing device to develop our prototype system. Although, the proposed method is specifically designed for the medialization laryngoplasty, our experimental framework can be applied to other image guided surgical applications.

[Talk Slides]

James Hahn, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair, Department of Computer Science

Dr. Hahn has been interested in basic research within the broad scope of computer graphics as well as their application in a number of important domains. He has led the development of a number of surgical training simulators and image-guided surgical procedures. He is the founding director of the Institute for Computer Graphics (ICG), Motion Capture and Analysis Laboratory, and the Institute for Biomedical Engineering.

Ge Jin received the BS degree in computer science from Peking University in 1997 and MS degree in computer science from Seoul National University in 2000. He received Doctor of Science degree from the George Washington University in 2007. Currently, he is a postdoctoral research scientist in the department of computer science at the George Washington University. His primary research interests fall in the field of computer graphics, medical image processing, image guided surgery, computer vision and computer animation. He is a member of the IEEE, SPIE, MICCAI and ACM SIGGRAPH.