Evaluation of a miniature electromagnetic position tracker.

The advent of miniaturized electromagnetic digitizers opens a variety of potential clinical applications for computer aided interventions using flexible instruments; endoscopes or catheters can easily be tracked within the body. With respect to the new applications, the systematic distortions induced by various materials such as closed metallic loops, wire guides, catheters, and ultrasound scan heads were systematically evaluated in this paper for a new commercial tracking system. We employed the electromagnetic tracking system Aurora (Mednetix/CH, NDI/Can); data were acquired using the serial port of a PC running SuSE Linux 7.1 (SuSE, Gmbh, Nürnberg). Objects introduced into the digitizer volume included wire loops of different diameters, wire guides, optical tracking tools, an ultrasonic (US) scan head, an endoscope with radial ultrasound scan head and various other objects used in operating rooms and interventional suites. Beyond this, we determined the influence of a C-arm fluoroscopy unit. To quantify the reliability of the system, the miniaturized sensor was mounted on a nonmetallic measurement rack while the transmitter was fixed at three different distances within the digitizer range. The tracker was shown to be more sensitive to distortions caused by materials close to the emitter (average distortion error 13.6 mm +/- 16.6 mm for wire loops positioned at a distance between 100 mm and 200 mm from the emitter). Distortions caused by materials near the sensor (distances smaller than 100 mm) are small (typical error 2.2 mm +/- 1.9 mm). The C-arm fluoroscopy unit caused considerable distortions and limits the reliability of the tracker (distortion error 18.6 mm +/- 24.9 mm). Distortions resulting from the US scan head are high at distances smaller than about 100 mm from the emitter. The distortions also increase when the scan head is positioned horizontally and close to the sensor (average error 4.1 mm +/- 1.5 mm when the scan head is positioned within a distance of 100 mm from the sensor). The distortions are slightly higher when the ultrasound machine is switched on. We also evaluated the influence of common medical instruments on distance measurements. For these measurements the average deviation from the known distance of 200 mm amounted to 3.0 mm +/- 1.5 mm (undistorted distance measurement 1.5 mm +/- 0.3 mm). The deviations also depend on the relative orientation between emitter and sensor. The results demonstrate that the miniature tracking system opens up new perspectives with regard to surgery applications where a flexible instrument is to be tracked within the body. Significant distortions caused by metallic objects only occur in the worst cases, for example, in the presence of a closed, unisiolated wire loop or a C-arm fluorescence unit close to the emitter and which can be avoided by suitable usage.