In modern surgery, it is desirable to accurately locate a target spot to operate on while reducing physical injuries of patients as much as possible, to achieve minimally invasive surgery, so as to overcome defects such as a large surgical wound, a long recovery phase or the like due to rough open surgery in the past, and to minimize the physical and psychological injuries of the patients. Image-guided interventional surgery can accurately locate a target spot to operate on, achieve features such as monitoring and navigation or the like in the process of surgery, and has advantages such as a small wound, a short recovery phase, a good curative effect or the like. Therefore, the interventional surgery is an important development direction for the modern surgery, and presents a trend to gradually replace the conventional open surgery.
Most of operations are directed to deep tissues. Conventional methods are done by cutting surface tissues open, and then performing relevant surgical treatment on the deep tissues. Therefore, in order to achieve image-guided operations to ensure safe and effective development of the operations, it is desirable to incorporate imageology technology for achieving three-dimensional imaging of the deep tissues. Currently, three three-dimensional imaging techniques, i.e., ultrasonics, CT and magnetic resonance imaging, have been successfully incorporated into surgical systems, to achieve image-guided surgical navigation, and have been successfully applied to clinic surgery for breast, abdomen, head or the like.
However, those three imaging approaches have low resolutions. Specifically, resolutions of clinical instruments using these approaches are in an order of millimeters. Therefore, only navigation for operations without high demands on fineness can be achieved. Further, current microscopic surgery based on optical surgical microscopes, for example, ophthalmic surgery, neurosurgery or the like,is limited to two-dimensional (for example, in an x-y plane) imaging. Although the optical surgical microscope used in the surgery has a resolution up to an order of micrometers, there has been no three-dimensional imaging (x-y-z 3D imaging) technology with a matched resolution to cooperate therewith. In addition, as an area to operate on in the microscopic surgery is very small, factors such as deformations due to vibration and tissue cutting in the operation will directly cause an overall deformation of the area to operate on. Therefore, non-real time imaging techniques,such as magnetic resonance and CT, are not suitable for navigation in the microscopic surgery. Due to the above problems, image navigation for operations has not been achieved so far in the microscopic surgery.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds