A Software Prototype for Treatment Planning and Intervention Support of Robot-Assisted Radiofrequency Ablations of Vertebral Metastases

When physicians want to treat vertebral body metastasis with radiofrequency ablations they have to consider many patient-specific factors, such as the metastasis count and their localization. There is a high interest in robotic-assisted approaches for this type of therapy, because they are hard to plan and execute. In this paper, we present our software prototype to support the planning and intervention execution stages of this therapy. Our work provides a list of nine application requirements, which we derived from interviewing our clinical and technical colleagues. Those requirements, while being tailored to a given setup, are constructed as general as possible to be reusable for different configurations. We focused on three intervention stages, namely image exploration, therapy planning, and intervention execution and mapped them to a systematic application usage design. From there, we combine multiple image and direct volume renderers with superimposed risk structure segmentations and applicator geometry. As a result, we designed a prototype to fulfill our requirements including a discussion of required visualizations and functionalities.