Clinical practice is increasingly replacing traditional open surgical procedures with minimally invasive techniques for cancer diagnosis and therapy. These procedures typically require placement of a surgical instrument into the organ of interest with a high degree of accuracy. In general, the success of a treatment or of a diagnosis is highly dependent on the accuracy of instrument insertion and thus depends crucially on the skills and the experience of the physician. While intra-operative navigation has been proven to be highly effective in interventions on bony or sufficiently rigid structures, such as the spine and the brain, computer-assisted soft tissue procedures are still limited to non-invasive diagnostics and surgical planning. This book discusses contemporary approaches in computer-assisted soft tissue interventions. It presents and evaluates a real-time motion compensation method for percutaneous abdominal interventions based on fiducial needles, a guidance method to allow for fast and precise insertion of a needle-shaped instrument along a predetermined trajectory and a respiratory liver motion simulator for evaluating the proposed methods in a realistic setting.

Lena Maier-Hein graduated with Distinction from the University ofKarlsruhe (TH) in 2005, earning a Diplom degree (Dipl.-Inform.)in Computer Science. Between 2005 and 2008, she worked on herPh.D. dissertation at the Division of Medical and BiologicalInformatics at the German Cancer Research Center and earned aPh.D. with Distinction in 2009.