Patent ID: 8468003

Claim:
A preoperative method for identifying locations for placing markers in the vicinity of a target in a patient prior to carrying out a surgical marker placement procedure, said method comprising: receiving image information of a thoracic anatomy including image information corresponding to segmented airways of the patient; receiving image information of a target in the vicinity of said thoracic anatomy including image information corresponding to segmented target tissue of the patient; and computing at least one candidate marker location; wherein said step of computing is carried out with a computer system comprising a processor operable to: a) identify anchorable points and their locations in tissue in the vicinity of the airways; b) assign a score to each of said anchorable points based on at least one constraint, and wherein the at least one constraint includes the computationally identified anchorable point location, the target location, and the distance from the anchorable point to the target; and c) selecting at least one candidate marker location based on the score of the anchorable points.