Automated 3D Head CT Image Registration for Augmented Reality-Assisted Ventricular Puncture

Abstract Augmented Reality (AR) has the potential to assist in neurosurgical procedures by providing real-time visual guidance. Previous work superimposes the cranial ventricular system (obtained from pre-operative data) on the patient’s head using AR. For this, pre-operative data needs to be registered to the intra-operative patient head. But currently, this registration is performed manually, which is a time-consuming task.We present preliminary work on an automated Computed Tomography (CT) image preprocessing and 3D registration pipeline for AR-assisted ventricular punctures. Our approach combines an automatic CT image segmentation and preprocessing with the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm to perform the registration. Experiments demonstrate a promising registration accuracy of 1.833 ± 0.395 mm for points of interest inside the ventricular system. Moreover, the execution duration of 0.8265 ± 0.002 s addresses the manual and timeconsuming registration used in previous work (100.5 s).