Studies On Application Of Computer Integration Technology In Image-Guided Ablation

The field of image-guided therapy (IGT) has evolved from early stereotactic methods to modern multi-modal image-based navigation systems and has experienced many exciting advancements, particularly in the area of minimally-invasive intervention. Much of the early innovation occurred within the field of neurosurgery, particularly for the treatment of brain tumors. Modern image-guidance techniques improve the visualization of pathologies with respect to adjacent tissue structures during tumor resection. They are used for precisely positioning and manipulating instruments and ablative devices.This integrated image-based approach has been adopted in many other clinical application areas and now involves advanced intra-operative imaging, image registration, image segmentation, visualization, navigation, and minimally-invasive ablative therapies and robotics. The system development is not without its challenges. (1) How to increase the creation and exchange of reusable components-IGT systems are complex and not every group should have to construct a platform from the ground up. The tool development process needs to be made more efficient by leveraging and improving existing toolkits. (2) The need for increased awareness of the utility of use-cases and surgical/interventional workflows that is critical to building clinically acceptable IGT systems. (3) The need for performance standards for validation. We must have a common understanding of how to evaluate the performance of an IGT system and its components. (4) The need to motivate engineers and industrial partners to provide Application Program Interfaces (APIs) and research interfaces for their software/devices. Improving pace and consistency in the development of IGT systems would be of significant benefit to the broad community of scientists, engineers and doctors who develop these systems and use them to improve patients'lives.We address these issues by developing a modular framework for the design, implementation and analysis of Computer Integrated System for image-guided ablation therapy. In this dissertation we first present the underlying theory for the IGT system. This theoretical foundation provides the ability to fully specify the technologies required for the system. Building on this foundation, we design a compositional system for image-guided ablation therapy. Then we develop three sample systems using the modular set of components and make some initial experiments using phantoms to verify and determine the accuracy of these systems.The system we describe could have several kinds of impact. First, it could speed the implementation of systems targeting new clinical requirements, by reducing the work required to combine existing components into functional systems. Second, by formalizing the requirements of and relationships between components in these systems, it could deepen the IGT community's understanding of complex systems it builds. Finally, it can provide a foundation on which other work can be built, resulting in systems which are deeper-including new aspects of needle-placement systems.