Disclosed herein are planning, navigation and simulation systems and methods for minimally invasive image-guided percutaneous intervention in which the planning method and system use patient-specific pre-operative images and instrument-specific parameters to generate a planned insertion path. A system includes a needle guide device that interfaces with a computing device to guide a needle-like probe towards target location within an anatomy of a subject. The computing device includes a processor configured to receive volumetric image data of the anatomy of the subject, and data about parameters of the needle guide device. One or more algorithms executed by the processor provide direct visualization of a parametric contour map superposed on an image of the patient's skin surface. A user can choose an optimal insertion point for the planned insertion path based the parametric contour map.