3D Ultrasound real-time monitoring of surgical tools

To assist surgeons during their surgical operations, which involve a tool insertion, a real-time application which is able to localise the surgical tool during its movement is proposed. The position of the needle is estimated with a method based on model fitting using a Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC). Our proposed application has been implemented on the ULTRASONIX RP scanner and it permits 3D volumes acquisition, storage and the tool localization. The developed graphical user interface shows both the section plane containing the tool and the perpendicular plane to it in order to give a view of surrounding tissue. The performed experiments have shown that our application is able to display the correct frame that contains the needle and localize surgical tools in real time and with a good accuracy in water, polyvinyl alcohol cryogel phantom and liver tissue. Refresh rates of displaying the result is less than one second for volumes of size 67 × 128 × 224 voxels. The time required to acquire this volume is about one second with the 4DC7-3/40 3D probe. So our application works at real-time.