R. Bauernschmitt, M. Feuerstein, E.U. Schirmbeck, N. Augustin, S.M. Wildhirt, R. Lange Improvement of Endovascular Stent Grafting by Augmented Reality Biomedizinische Technik (BMT 2005), Volume 50, Supplementary vol. 1, Part 2, pp. 1262 - 1263, Nuremberg, Germany, September 2005 (bib)
	Endovascular stent grafting of aortic aneurysms and dissections is a new, promising alternative to open surgical repair. Due to the early stage of development, there is still a lack of technical aid besides the standard equipment like computed tomography and X-Ray to meet the special needs of stent implantation. Preliminary steps have to be taken to fit the two image modalities, e.g. creating Digitally Reconstructed Radiographs (DRR) to make CT data look like X-ray data and to merge the two modalities intraoperatively. OPEN INVENTOR provides a vast range of basic geometric functions for calculations enabling further image processing. amiraTM (version 3.0) is chosen as the graphical core for the implementation of the planning and navigation tool. Amira is able to visualize and reconstruct three-dimensional images from resulting data of acquiring methods. By constructing a DRR from CT-data, alignment of the two data sources was achieved. After finishing the merging procedure, additional informations of CT-data can now be included and are presented to the physician during the intervention. We expect that our system will improve precision and help to reduce dramatically X-ray exposure and use of contrast dye.
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