Deformable resection process map for intraoperative cutting guides.

In this paper, we will introduce the concept of deformable resection process mapping as a time-varying geometric guide for soft tissue tumor resection procedures. The deformable resection process map (RPM) estimates the local appearance of vascular structures after cuts as a novel guide. The RPM can be directly generated from patient-specific medical images using volumetric resampling techniques. Since user input of some cutting points is the only requirement for generating the RPM, the developed software will be directly available for clinical use to preview surgical procedures and intraoperative workflow management without time-consuming setups or additional workloads. We used the CT images of the patients with hepatic cancer for the experiments. The performance of our method in the shape representation for a curved cut surface was compared with that of conventional shape modeling methods.