US Patent 7630753 Method and apparatus for perspective inversion

A surgical instrument navigation system is disclosed that allows a surgeon to invert the three-dimensional perspective of the instrument to match their perspective of the actual instrument. A data processor is operable to generate a three-dimensional representation of a surgical instrument as it would visually appear from either of at least two different perspectives and to overlay the representation of the surgical instrument onto an image data of the patient. The image data and the representations can be displayed on a display.