TAToo: Vision-based Joint Tracking of Anatomy and Tool for Skull-base Surgery

TL;DR

TAToo is a novel vision-based system that jointly tracks the 3D motion of both the surgical tool and patient anatomy in skull-base surgery using stereo videos, enabling markerless intra-operative guidance.

Contribution

TAToo introduces an end-to-end differentiable, probabilistic approach for simultaneous 3D tracking of anatomy and tools directly from surgical videos, without markers.

Findings

Achieves sub-millimeter accuracy for skull tracking

Attains rotation errors below 1 degree

Performs favorably compared to existing methods

Abstract

Purpose: Tracking the 3D motion of the surgical tool and the patient anatomy is a fundamental requirement for computer-assisted skull-base surgery. The estimated motion can be used both for intra-operative guidance and for downstream skill analysis. Recovering such motion solely from surgical videos is desirable, as it is compliant with current clinical workflows and instrumentation. Methods: We present Tracker of Anatomy and Tool (TAToo). TAToo jointly tracks the rigid 3D motion of patient skull and surgical drill from stereo microscopic videos. TAToo estimates motion via an iterative optimization process in an end-to-end differentiable form. For robust tracking performance, TAToo adopts a probabilistic formulation and enforces geometric constraints on the object level. Results: We validate TAToo on both simulation data, where ground truth motion is available, as well as on anthropomorphic phantom data, where optical tracking provides a strong baseline. We report sub-millimeter and millimeter inter-frame tracking accuracy for skull and drill, respectively, with rotation errors below 1{\deg}. We further illustrate how TAToo may be used in a surgical navigation setting. Conclusion: We present TAToo, which simultaneously tracks the surgical tool and the patient anatomy in skull-base surgery. TAToo directly predicts the motion from surgical videos, without the need of any markers. Our results show that the performance of TAToo compares favorably to competing approaches. Future work will include fine-tuning of our depth network to reach a 1 mm clinical accuracy goal desired for surgical applications in the skull base.