Mixed reality liver puncture

Minimal invasive surgery is a growing trend. In the case of treating liver tumors, there is the option to treat minimal invasive with ablation needles. Accuracy of needle placement is key to enhance the clinical outcomes and patient safety. Interventional radiologists use different modalities for navigation, with intra-operative CT images being a widely chosen one. While several papers conclude that navigation systems using optical tracking or robotics are superior in terms of accuracy, wide adoption is lacking. The reason seems to be mainly the ease of use and the increased intervention time. This study aims to explore using augmented reality (AR) as a new interface for liver ablation. A phantom experiment with 3 radiologists and a control group is performed to identify the differences in terms of accuracy, duration and usability between the current CT-guided method and the proposed AR method.