Patent ID: 8214020

Claim:
A method for implementing a tomographically-assisted, minimally-invasive interventional procedure of a patient, comprising the steps of: instructing the patient to perform a breath hold and, during said breath hold, measuring a threshold value of a pulmonary pressure in the lungs of the patient; continuously detecting successive inspiratory/expiratory positions of the patient by continuously detecting said pulmonary pressure; conducting a plurality of tomographic scans of the patient during said interventional procedure and, for each of said scans in said plurality of scans, automatically initiating acquisition of a tomographic slice image of the patient, at an image acquisition time, when the continuously detected pulmonary pressure is within a tolerance range bounded by an upper boundary and a lower boundary of respectively different magnitudes around said threshold value of said pulmonary pressure, said tomographic slice image being comprised of image data; automatically ending said image acquisition in each of said scans when said pulmonary pressure assumes a value outside of said tolerance range, each of said scans being defined by the initiating and ending of said image acquisition; continuously detecting values of said pulmonary pressure including when said pulmonary pressure is below said lower boundary and when said pulmonary pressure is above said upper boundary, and identifying a plurality of values representing an inspiratory/expiratory breathing volume of the patient from said plurality of values of said pulmonary pressure, and generating a computerized report file of each of said scans that includes a representation of said breathing volume of the patient with respect to time; and after each of said scans, identifying an extreme value of said pulmonary pressure, selected from the group consisting of a maximum value and a minimum value, and including the identification of said extreme value in said computerized report file and identifying an average value of the respective extreme values of said plurality of scans and, if said average of said extreme value is within said tolerance range, automatically adapting at least one of said lower boundary and said upper boundary relative to said average of said extreme value, to generate at least one adapted boundary value, and using said at least one adapted boundary value to automatically initiate or end a next scan in said plurality of scans of the patient during said interventional procedure.