Stereo-guided volumetric deformation recovery

A method for soft tissue deformation recovery is presented and tested on both simulated and real data. The approach is based on a combination of a volumetric deformable model and a surface tracking algorithm. Soft tissue deformation is often complex and dependent on many factors. For this reason, in order to reliably estimate the deformation, the model has to be guided by the available, typically limited, data. We propose the use of stereo cameras for guidance, where the reconstructed surface is used as a boundary condition for the partial differential equations that define the model. The goal of this work is to reduce the error in surgical navigation systems introduced by the brain shift - brain deformation that occurs during the surgery.