Real-time marker-free patient registration for electromagnetic navigated bronchoscopy: a phantom study.

Purpose: To perform bronchoscopy safely and smoothly, it is very important to develop a bronchoscopic guidance system. Transbronchial lung biopsy (TBLB) with a bronchoscopic guidance system especially should permit safe image-guided procedures. Recently, electromagnetic tracking (EMT) is utilized to track the tip of the bronchoscope camera in real time. For most tracking methods using position sensors, registration between tracking data and previously acquired reference image data, such as CT image, is performed using natural landmarks of the patient or fiducial markers attached to the patient, whose positions need to be measured manually by the physician before the actual bronchoscopy. Therefore, this paper proposes a marker-free CT-to-patient registration method utilizing bronchoscope's position and orientation obtained by the EMT.

Methods: We developed a guidance system that is able to track the tip of the bronchoscope camera in real time. In the case of a guidance system that uses position sensors, natural landmarks of the patient or fiducial markers attached to the patient are needed to obtain the correspondence between EMT outputs and previously acquired reference image data, such as CT image. This paper proposes a registration method without landmarks or fiducials by estimating the transformation matrix between the patient and the CT image taken prior to the bronchoscopic examination. This estimation is performed by computing correspondences between the outputs of the EMT sensor and airways extracted from the CT image. As ambiguities between EMT measurements and their corresponding airway branches may arise at airway bifurcations, we introduce a stable airway branch selection mechanism for improving the robustness of the estimation of the transformation matrix. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we applied the method to a rubber bronchial phantom and added virtual breathing motion to the sensor output.

Results: Experimental results show that the accuracy of our proposed method is within 2.0-3.0 mm (without breathing motion) and 2.5-3.5 mm (with breathing motion). The proposed method could also track a bronchoscope camera in real time.

Conclusions: We developed a method for CT-to-patient registration using a position sensor without fiducial markers and natural landmarks. Endoscopic guided biopsy of lung lesions is feasible using a marker-free CT-to-patient registration method.