Image Guided Patient Positioning and Immobilisation for Effective Therapy

Computer-assisted and image-guided therapy setups mostly rely on an accurate and stable positioning of the patient or the affected body region. This is an important prerequisite for transferring a pre-operative plan into an appropriate delivery of therapy - for example by means of a robot system. Positioning of the patient must not only be accurate and stable - for some applications it also is indispensable to have a reproducible position during several fractions of therapy. This is also related to another requirement addressed in the project: the logistic effort of such a positioning and immobilization system should be as small as possible. One application example for such requirements is radiation therapy - but the concepts outlined in the project also can be transferred to many other surgical procedures in orthopaedics, tumor surgery, maxillofacial surgery, etc.

Project tasks include the development of novel methods for reproducible patient positioning as well as methods for safe and reliable evaluation of the correct positioning.