Preliminary Clinical Experience with a Navigation System for Biopsies in a Diagnostic 1.5T Closed-Bore MR Scanner

Michael Moche¹, Dirk Zajonz¹, Tim-Ole Petersen¹, Jochen Fuchs¹, Gregor Thrmer¹, Nikita Garnov¹, Thomas Kahn¹, Harald Busse¹

Minimally-invasive MR-guided interventions are becoming increasingly important due to a number of well-known advantages of MRI over other imaging modalities. Over the last years, different concepts for interventional assistance and instrument navigation have been described for practically all regions of the body. This work presents a compact and easily implementable concept for standard cylindrical scanners where the patient is moved out of the bore and the navigation system uses instrument positions that are properly registered to the MR coordinates of 3D anatomical roadmap data. Our preliminary clinical experience from four navigated biopsies in different regions of the body is reported.