ABSTRACT
Cardiac interventions have been among the last disciplines to embrace minimally invasive techniques, mainly due to the challenges associated with access and visualization inside the beating heart. This chapter describes technologies and techniques toward the development, evaluation, and preclinical integration of image guidance environments for surgical navigation for minimally invasive cardiac applications. We also describe several applications to cardiac image guidance, including valve repair and replacement procedures, cardiac ablation therapy for arrhythmia treatment planning, guidance and monitoring, cardiac regeneration therapy, MR-guided robot-assisted cardiac therapy, and augmented procedure planning techniques for robot-assisted coronary artery bypass procedures.
