ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,551,132, issued on Feb. 17, was assigned to Covidien LP (Mansfield, Mass.).
"Hybrid registration method" was invented by Dorian Averbuch (Ramat Hasharon, Israel), Oded Zur (Kochav-Ya'ir zur Yigal, Israel) and Oren P. Weingarten (Hod-Hasharon, Israel).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A registration method whereby a sensor-based approach is used to establish initial registration and whereby upon the commencement of navigating an endoscope, image-based registration methods are used in order to more accurately maintain the registration between the endoscope location and previously-acquired images. A six-degree-of-freedom location sensor is plac...