Image-guided surgery(IGS) is the general term used for any surgical procedure where the surgeon employs tracked surgical instruments in conjunction with preoperative or intraoperative images in order to indirectly guide the procedure. Most image-guided surgical procedures are minimally invasive. A field of medicine that pioneered and specializes in minimally invasive image guided surgery is interventional radiology.
The technology was originally developed for treatment of brain tumors, but has found widest application when applied to surgery of the sinuses, where image-guided surgery helps avoid damage to brain and nervous system.
A hand-held surgical probe is an essential component of any image-guided surgery system. During the surgical procedure, the IGS tracks the probe position and displays the anatomy beneath it as, for example, three orthogonal image slices on a workstation-based 3D imaging system. Existing IGS systems use different tracking techniques including mechanical, optical, ultrasonic, and electromagnetic.