Spatial-stiffness analysis of surface-based registration

We have developed anew approach for preoperative selection of points from a surface model for rigid shape-based registration. This approach is based on an extension of our earlier spatial-stiffness model of fiducial registration. We compared our approach with the maximization of the noise-amplification index (NAI), using target registration accuracy (TRE) as our comparison measure, on models derived from computed tomography scans of volunteers. In this study, our approach was substantially less expensive to compute than maximizing the NAI and produced similar TREs with smaller variances. Optimal incremental selection shows promise for improving the preoperative selection of registration points for image-guided surgical procedures.