Breast-conserving surgery (BCS) is a surgical intervention for breast cancer where the surgeon resects the primary tumor and preserves the surrounding healthy tissue. These procedures have a high failure rate (over 30%) because it is often difficult to localize breast tumor boundaries intraoperatively. The NaviKnife system is a surgical navigation platform that was designed to address this challenge. Using electromagnetic navigation, the NaviKnife platform allows the surgeon to visualize the position of their resection tools relative to the tumor. One of the disadvantages of the NaviKnife platform, however, is that it is still heavily reliant on freehand guidance.

We hypothesize that haptic feedback, in the form of a virtual fixture, can further improve the NaviKnife system and consequently, the standard of care in BCS. In this paper, we describe the implementation of a virtual fixture system for BCS, using a recently published, open-source platform, SlicerROS2 and a haptic device called the Phantom Omni. We describe how to modify this programming platform for a new application, as well as the necessary hardware interfaces for deployment. More generally, we show a clinical application of SlicerROS2 to demonstrate how this platform can be adapted to image-guided robotics applications.