Otologic surgery is undertaken to treat ailments of the ear including persistent infections, hearing loss, vertigo, and cancer. Typically performed on healthy patients in outpatient facilities, the application of image-guided surgery has been limited because accurate ( < 1 mm), non-invasive fiducial systems for otologic surgery are not available. We have developed such a system, which repeatably attaches to a subject via a dental bite block. In a previous report, ex-vivo validation indicated that mean target registration error +- standard deviation for 234 targets within the surgical field was 0.73 +- 0.23 mm with a root mean square of 0.77mm. In an effort to further understand the limitations of our system, we undertook, and report herein, a detailed error analysis to determine what portion of the error is attributable to the inaccuracies in relocation fit of the fiducial frame to a subject's dentition. Our analysis shows that the root-mean-square error due to relocation alone is approximately 0.66 mm, while that due to fiducial registration is approximately 0.30 mm.
展开▼
