Image Guided Computer Assisted Microwave Ablation For Liver Cancer

Liver cancer is one of the most common malignant tumor, for most patients with primary and metastatic liver tumors because of its location or have other causes of liver disease, surgery can not accept the demand, a novel computer-aided image guided surgery system is proposed for liver cancer microwave ablation in this paper. For liver cancer, the microwave ablation is a very effective method of hyperthermia. It can help the clinical surgeon to perform preoperative surgery planning based on real-time visualized 3D patient anatomy structure using advanced GPU-accelerated visualization techniques.An framework for thermal field simulation and 3D necrosis zone reconstruction is proposed, and the necrosis model is further superimposed to patient anatomy structures. The full surgery planning is performed by the surgeon in an interactively way, until the optimal surgery plan is achieved. Experiments have been performed on realistic patient with liver cancer and the actual necrosis zone are measured in postoperative CT images for patient. Results show that this method is accurate for surgery simulation and could be used as an assistant to the clinical practice.