Apparatus and method for four dimensional soft tissue navigation in endoscopic applications

A method of determining six POSE orientation parameters of a medical catheter, the method comprising:

• steering the medical catheter to an anatomical position in a patient, the catheter having a tip, the tip including a five degree of freedom electromagnetic sensor, the five degree of freedom electromagnetic sensor providing five POSE parameters of the tip;
• forming a 3D navigation model representative of a lung anatomy of the patient from CT data, the lung anatomy including at least the anatomical position;
• presenting an image of the anatomical position within the 3D navigation model of the lung anatomy on a user display;
• manually activating a control mechanism of the medical catheter to repeatedly move the tip in an arc constrained to a plane at the anatomical position;
• applying PCA analysis of a time window of the five degree of freedom sensor locations during the movement of the tip to detect a PCA signature;
• analyzing the PCA signature to determine the sixth POSE orientation parameter of the tip.