KEYWORDS: Gelatin, 3D modeling, Computed tomography, Kidney, Image registration, 3D printing, Manufacturing, 3D image processing, Tissues, Process modeling
Patient specific organ and tissue mimicking phantoms are used routinely to develop and assess new image-guided intervention tools and techniques in laboratory settings, enabling scientists to maintain acceptable anatomical relevance, while avoiding animal studies when the developed technology is still in its infancy. Gelatin phantoms, specifically, offer a cost-effective and readily available alternative to the traditional manufacturing of anatomical phantoms, and also provide the necessary versatility to mimic various stiffness properties specific to various organs or tissues. In this study, we describe the protocol to develop patient specific anthropomorphic gelatin kidney phantoms and we also assess the faithfulness of the developed phantoms against the patient specific CT images and corresponding virtual anatomical models used to generate the phantoms. We built the gelatin phantoms by first using additive manufacturing to generate a kidney mold based on patient specific CT images, into which the gelatin was poured. We then evaluated the fidelity of the phantoms (i.e., children) against the virtual kidney model generated from the patient specific CT image (i.e., parent) by comparing it to the surface model of the mold and gelatin phantoms (i.e., children) following their CT imaging post-manufacturing using various registration metrics. Our experiments showed a 0.58 ± 0.48 mm surface-to-surface distance between the phantoms and mold models following landmark-based registration, and 0.52 ± 0.40 mm surface-to-surface distance between the phantoms and the mold model following Iterative Closest Point (ICP) registration. These experiments confirm that the described protocol provides a reliable, fast, and cost-effective method for manufacturing faithful patient specific organ emulating gelatin phantoms and can be applied or extended to other image-guided intervention applications.
Minimally invasive image-guided interventions (IGIs) enable better therapy outcomes for patients, but navigation accuracy is highly dependent on the accuracy of the image-/model-to-patient registration. This requires methods to reduce the uncertainty to a level appropriate for the procedure being performed. Since sub-surface tissue landmarks cannot be easily sampled using a tracked stylus and used to perform the patient registration, here we present a method that employs a tracked camera (that mimics a laparoscope) to perform the patient registration or update this registration in case of suspected misalignment within the context of an image-guided renal navigation procedure. We implement and test the method using a simplified patient phantom, which consists of a foam block to which a virtual kidney model featuring both surface and sub-surface landmarks is registered. This setup mimics a situation when a surgeon would navigate a tracked needle to renal landmarks percutaneously, while relying on pre-procedural imaging, optical tracking, and surface video imaging. We conduct several experiments under both optimal phantom registration and purposely altered registration, to not only show the effect of phantom / patient mis-registration on subsequent navigation, but also demonstrate the use of the camera-based registration to restore navigation to an acceptable uncertainty. Our results illustrate that camera-based registration yields a target registration error on the order of 0.4 mm and a subsequent targeting error on the order of 0.6 mm, comparable to the performance achieved following gold-standard landmark-based registration. These results suggest that the proposed method can be used to perform or update the patient registration for image-guided interventions involving sub-surface organs.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.