Interpatient Respiratory Motion Model Transfer for Virtual Reality Simulations of Liver Punctures
This addresses the cost and dose burden in medical training simulations for healthcare professionals, though it is incremental as it builds on existing motion modeling techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of unrealistic respiratory motion in VR liver puncture simulators by transferring a personalized 4D motion model from a reference patient to a new static 3D patient using non-linear registration, reducing the need for costly 4D data acquisition.
Current virtual reality (VR) training simulators of liver punctures often rely on static 3D patient data and use an unrealistic (sinusoidal) periodic animation of the respiratory movement. Existing methods for the animation of breathing motion support simple mathematical or patient-specific, estimated breathing models. However with personalized breathing models for each new patient, a heavily dose relevant or expensive 4D data acquisition is mandatory for keyframe-based motion modeling. Given the reference 4D data, first a model building stage using linear regression motion field modeling takes place. Then the methodology shown here allows the transfer of existing reference respiratory motion models of a 4D reference patient to a new static 3D patient. This goal is achieved by using non-linear inter-patient registration to warp one personalized 4D motion field model to new 3D patient data. This cost- and dose-saving new method is shown here visually in a qualitative proof-of-concept study.