Optical surgical instrument tracking system based on the principle of stereo vision.

Zhentian Zhou,Zhiyuan Liang,Juan Duan,Xu Zhang,Bo Wu,Nan Zhang

doi:10.1117/1.jbo.22.6.065005

Abstract

Optical tracking systems are widely adopted in surgical navigation. An optical tracking system is designed based on the principle of stereo vision with high-precision and low cost. This system uses optical infrared LEDs that are installed on the surgical instrument as markers and a near-infrared filter is added in front of the Bumblebee2 stereo camera lens to eliminate the interference of ambient light. The algorithm based on the region growing method is designed and used for the marker’s pixel coordinates’ extraction. In this algorithm, the singular points are eliminated and the gray centroid method is applied to solve the pixel coordinate of the marker’s center. Then, the marker’s matching algorithm is adopted and three-dimensional coordinates’ reconstruction is applied to derive the coordinates of the surgical instrument tip in the world coordinate system. In the simulation, the stability, accuracy, rotation tests, and the tracking angle and area range were carried out for a typical surgical instrument and the miniature surgical instrument. The simulation results show that the proposed optical tracking system has high accuracy and stability. It can meet the requirements of surgical navigation.

Highlights

An image-guided surgical navigation system breaks through the limits of the traditional surgical operation and extends the doctors’ limited vision scope.[1,2] Tracking and positioning are the key techniques of an image-guided surgical navigation system
Based upon stereotactic surgery principles, this paper proposes an optical tracking system with low cost and high precision
The results show that the proposed optical tracking system has a higher accuracy and it can meet the accuracy requirement of space tracking equipment in surgical navigation

Summary

Introduction

An image-guided surgical navigation system breaks through the limits of the traditional surgical operation and extends the doctors’ limited vision scope.[1,2] Tracking and positioning are the key techniques of an image-guided surgical navigation system. Compared with optical tracking, electromagnetic navigation has less precision and its magnetic field is prone to distortion by large metal objects which bring measurement errors to the system.[3,6] The commercial optical tracking systems currently used in surgical navigation products mainly include micron tracker (Claron Technology Inc., Canada),[7] polaris optical tracking systems (Northern Digital Inc., Canada),[8] StealthStation system (Medtronic Inc., United States),[9] etc These products are always expensive and they are not convenient for further development and customization due to proprietary techniques

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion