Preoperative Non-Invasive Staging of Lymph Nodes

In this paper a pre-operative non-invasive technique for evaluation and staging of lymph nodes in order to optimize surgical planning is presented. Lymph node stiffness is an useful information for staging and is usually obtained with surgical intervention. In our work 3D dynamic models of lymph nodes are obtained from medical scans. Lymph node models are inserted in a laparoscopy simulator developed at the ALTAIR laboratory, University of Verona. Interaction through a haptic device gives the surgeon hints about lymph node stiffness.