Bronchoscopy Navigation beyond Electromagnetic Tracking Systems: A Novel Bronchoscope Tracking Prototype

A novel bronchoscope tracking prototype was designed and validated for bronchoscopic navigation. We construct a novel mouth- or nose-piece bronchoscope model to directly measure the movement information of a bronchoscope outside of a patient's body. Fusing the measured movement information based on sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) sampler, we exploit accurate and robust intra-operative alignment between the pre- and intra-operative image data for augmenting surgical bronchoscopy. We validate our new prototype on phantom datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed prototype is a promising approach to navigate a bronchoscope beyond EMT systems.