Mixed Reality Guided Radiofrequency Needle Placement: A Pilot Study

This paper presents a novel mixed reality (MR) guidance method for liver tumors radiofrequency ablation (RFA). Compared with traditional computed tomography (CT)-guided method, our system can provide a more natural and intuitive surgical mode for surgeons. In essence, our system is a holographic navigation platform, which projects a MR overlay onto the patient via HoloLens during RFA. We first reconstruct the patient-specific anatomy structure from the CT images of abdominal phantom. Then, a tailored precise registration method is employed to map the virtual-real spatial information. In addition, considering that tumor shifting during biopsy severely impacts the accuracy of RFA, our guidance system involves a motion compensation computation through data-driven physically-based modeling in holographic environment. In experiments, we conduct a user study on the comparison trial between MR-guided and CT-guided biopsy. User feedback demonstrates that our MR guidance method for needle placement procedure has the potential to simplify the operation, reduce the operation difficulty, shorten the operation time, and raise the operation precision.