A navigator of the patient's anatomy model for intra-operative surgical guidance

Minimally invasive surgery offers advantages that make it the best choice for many diseases. The Virtual Reality technology gives a great support to this kind of surgical procedures through medical image processing and visualization, 3D organ's reconstruction and intra-operative surgical guidance. In this paper is presented an advanced visualization and navigation system and the surgeon has the possibility to visualize both the traditional patient information, as the CT image set, and a 3D model of the patient's anatomy built from this. Two different visualization modalities are available in real time and dynamically. According to the surgeon needs, it is possible to obtain the automatic reslicing of the orthogonal planes in order to have an accurate visualization of the 3D model and slices exactly next to the actual position of the surgical instrument tip. In addition, it is possible to activate the clipping modality that allows cutting the 3D model in correspondence of a chosen visualization plane. The system can be used as support for the diagnosis, for the surgical preoperative planning and also for an image-guided surgery.