Surgical instrument placement is the most common procedure of image-guided interventions for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. During these procedures, the accuracy of the surgical instrument placement is very important to minimize the risks to the patient and improve health outcomes. Misdiagnosis and delayed or unsuccessful treatment can be the result from the misplacement of the surgical instrument. Currently, many image modalities, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and computed tomography (CT) scanning, are often used for surgical instrument placement procedures to make sure the placement of the surgical instrument is accurate. Although these image modalities can provide many advantages, the real-time position of surgical instruments cannot be provided without continually imaging the patient. This could cause increased intervention time or radiation to patients since multiple scans need to be done to make sure the position of the surgical instrument. Therefore, combining these image modalities with other navigation methods to acquire real-time position information of the surgical instrument can further improve the efficiency and accuracy of the placement, and reduce complications.

The work described in this dissertation aims to develop disposable tracking tools and systems for assisting surgical instrument placement and improving the accuracy in minimally invasive surgeries. A six degrees of freedom electromagnetic tracking needle clip was developed, which could be mounted on 16-to 22-gauge needles to provide real-time position ad orientation information of the needle tip. And two tracking systems based on magnet and magnetometer were presented for assisting needle placement and surgical procedure in video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery, respectively. In addition, a low-cost, disposable and easy-to-use angulation tracking device was developed to help improve the needle placement accuracy. Furthermore, a 3D print technology-based lung phantom was developed to train interventional radiology fellows to use novel navigation tools or devices in image-guided procedures for improving the surgical instrument placement accuracy.