Plausibility check for error compensation in electromagnetic navigation in endoscopic sinus surgery

In this contribution we present a method for checking plausibility of electromagnetically measured position values in the vicinity of metallic surgical instruments and OR equipment Furthermore, the method is used in a simple and applicable error compensation algorithm. We present the results of a first analysis of the method for navigation in ENT surgery. The concept is based on redundant pose information of a tool. This is achieved by a rigid electromagnetic localizer consisting of two sensor elements each measuring the pose of the tool tip separately. The length of the difference vector of the measured positions is a measure for the plausibility. We applied the method in a navigation system for FESS and determined the correlation of the measuring error caused by metallic instruments. The experiment showed that the computed plausibility value shows sufficient correlation to relevant measuring errors.