Navigation with Local Sensors in Handheld 3D Ultrasound Initial in-vivo Experience

Handheld ultrasound is useful for intra-operative imaging, but requires additional tracking hardware to be useful in navigated intervention settings, such as biopsies, ablation therapy, injections etc. Unlike common probe-andneedle tracking approaches involving global or local tracking, we propose to use a bracket with a combination of very low-cost local sensors – cameras with projectors, optical mice and accelerometers – to reconstruct patient surfaces, needle poses, and the probe trajectory with multiple degrees of freedom, but no global tracking overhead. We report our experiences from a rst series of benchtop and in-vivo human volunteer experiments.