Development of 3D Navigation System for Retained Auricular Prosthesis Application

Computer aided surgery (CAS) had been an important research topic in recent years. 3D navigation is the crucial technique in the CAS applications. In this paper, a sound-guided 3D navigation system used for the retained auricular prosthesis surgery wad developed. This system consists of a 3D digitizer arm, a 3D space coordinate transformation module and a sound-guided navigation module. A 3D digitizer is a 5 degree-of-freedom passive robotic arm, and it is used to measure the coordinates of the registration and implant landmarks of the patient. The measured coordinates of landmarks are further compared with the patient's 3D reconstruction computer model that is constructed in terms of the computed tomography (CT) images to calculate the coordinate transformation matrix. The transformed implant coordinates are desired for the real-time navigations. In addition, the proposed sound-guided navigation module provides the real-time surgical guidance based on different audio tones and intermittence frequencies to improve the surgical accuracy. Finally, a clinical study of the retained auricular prosthesis surgery is introduced in this paper. Based on the results of the clinical validation, the proposed system effectively assistants the surgeon to increase the surgical quality and reduce the surgical time as well.