Vision-based hand-eye calibration for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery.

Abstract

The knowledge of laparoscope vision can greatly improve the surgical operation room (OR) efficiency. For the vision-based computer-assisted surgery, the hand-eye calibration establishes the coordinate relationship between laparoscope and robot slave arm. While significant advances have been made for hand-eye calibration in recent years, efficient algorithm for minimally invasive surgical robot is still a major challenge. Removing the external calibration object in abdominal environment to estimate the hand-eye transformation is still a critical problem. We propose a novel hand-eye calibration algorithm to tackle the problem which relies purely on surgical instrument already in the operating scenario for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS). Our model is formed by the geometry information of the surgical instrument and the remote center-of-motion (RCM) constraint. We also enhance the algorithm with stereo laparoscope model. Promising validation of synthetic simulation and experimental surgical robot system have been conducted to evaluate the proposed method. We report results that the proposed method can exhibit the hand-eye calibration without calibration object. Vision-based hand-eye calibration is developed. We demonstrate the feasibility to perform hand-eye calibration by taking advantage of the components of surgical robot system, leading to the efficiency of surgical OR.