Impact of an Advanced Patient Registration on the Experimental Targeting Accuracy of Percutaneous MRI Interventions Guided by a Clinical Navigation System

Harald Busse¹, Nikita Garnov¹, Gregor Thrmer¹, Thomas Kahn¹, Michael Moche¹

Many radiological and surgical interventions are guided by preoperative or intraoperative MRI data that need to be registered to the patient, a task typically accomplished by marker-based methods. This work presents a fully automatic technique for simultaneous 3D localization of a larger (>3) number of MR-visible markers, which was generally found to be fast, accurate and very reliable. Using the example of a clinical navigation solution for closed-bore MRI scanners, the use of five instead of three markers for patient registration may significantly improve targeting accuracy. These findings are likely to apply to other MR markers and settings as well.