Patent ID: 9655545
Date: 2017-05-23
CPC Classifications: A61B,G02B,G06T

Claim:
1. An apparatus for measuring mechanical properties of tissue comprising: a stereo optical surgical microscope comprising: a digital image processing system adapted to determine surface topography of tissue from stereo pairs of images obtained by the at least two digital cameras; at least one indenter; and mechanical modeling routines stored in memory of the digital image processing system, the mechanical modeling routines adapted to construct a computer model of mechanical properties of tissue, and fitting parameters of the computer model to a measured displacement map obtained by co-registering surface topography of tissue without indenter on the tissue and surface topography of the tissue with the indenter positioned on the tissue; the apparatus further comprising a display system for displaying a map of fitted parameters of the computer model; wherein the memory is further configured to store preoperative locations of particular selected structures, and wherein the mechanical modeling routines are further adapted to determine intraoperative locations of the particular selected structures using the fitted parameters; wherein the image processing system is configured to determine the surface topography of the tissue by subtracting a model of the indenter from surface topography determined from stereo pairs of images.