Visualization of needle access pathway and a five-DoF evaluation.

It is a common practice nowadays to plan needle access pathways to the volumetric organs before performing surgeries. An enormous amount of needle access planning systems has been proposed in recent years. Recent works mainly focus on the system usability or target accessibility. Visualization of the planned access pathways has drawn little attention and its effect on insertion quality is left unattended. We aim to address this problem by introducing an all-round evaluation framework that links up with human motions and computer graphics. Our evaluation framework provides an objective and quantitative analysis of the illustrativeness of the needle access pathway visualization techniques to an extent of five degrees of freedom. Our experimental results show that the visualization method adopted greatly influences insertion accuracy. Based on this finding, we propose a new visualization technique that intuitively conveys placement and orientation information. We also show that our method better conveys pathway orientation and thus enables a higher quality of insertion.