Real-time 3D Tracking of Articulated Tools for Robotic Surgery
This addresses the problem of real-time tool tracking for robotic surgery, enabling safer tool-tissue interaction and surgical skills assessment, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing tracking approaches.
The paper tackles real-time 3D tracking of articulated tools in robotic surgery by proposing a method based on CAD models and robot kinematics, achieving performance advantages over state-of-the-art in phantom, ex vivo, and in vivo experiments.
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.