Real-time 3D Tracking of Articulated Tools for Robotic Surgery

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time 3D tracking method for articulated surgical tools that combines CAD models, robot kinematics, and robust verification to improve accuracy and efficiency in robotic surgery applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel online tracking approach that integrates CAD models, robot kinematics, and outlier rejection for real-time articulated tool tracking in surgery.

Findings

Demonstrated superior accuracy over state-of-the-art methods.

Validated with phantom, ex vivo, and in vivo data.

Achieved real-time performance in complex surgical scenarios.

Abstract

In robotic surgery, tool tracking is important for providing safe tool-tissue interaction and facilitating surgical skills assessment. Despite recent advances in tool tracking, existing approaches are faced with major difficulties in real-time tracking of articulated tools. Most algorithms are tailored for offline processing with pre-recorded videos. In this paper, we propose a real-time 3D tracking method for articulated tools in robotic surgery. The proposed method is based on the CAD model of the tools as well as robot kinematics to generate online part-based templates for efficient 2D matching and 3D pose estimation. A robust verification approach is incorporated to reject outliers in 2D detections, which is then followed by fusing inliers with robot kinematic readings for 3D pose estimation of the tool. The proposed method has been validated with phantom data, as well as ex vivo and in vivo experiments. The results derived clearly demonstrate the performance advantage of the proposed method when compared to the state-of-the-art.