SurgTrack: CAD-Free 3D Tracking of Real-world Surgical Instruments
This addresses the challenge of 3D instrument tracking in surgical navigation for clinical practice, offering a CAD-free solution that is incremental in improving robustness and accuracy.
The paper tackles the problem of 3D tracking of surgical instruments without CAD models, proposing SurgTrack, a two-stage method that uses an Instrument Signed Distance Field for registration and posture graph optimization for robustness, achieving state-of-the-art performance with a remarkable improvement in experiments.
Vision-based surgical navigation has received increasing attention due to its non-invasive, cost-effective, and flexible advantages. In particular, a critical element of the vision-based navigation system is tracking surgical instruments. Compared with 2D instrument tracking methods, 3D instrument tracking has broader value in clinical practice, but is also more challenging due to weak texture, occlusion, and lack of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models for 3D registration. To solve these challenges, we propose the SurgTrack, a two-stage 3D instrument tracking method for CAD-free and robust real-world applications. In the first registration stage, we incorporate an Instrument Signed Distance Field (SDF) modeling the 3D representation of instruments, achieving CAD-freed 3D registration. Due to this, we can obtain the location and orientation of instruments in the 3D space by matching the video stream with the registered SDF model. In the second tracking stage, we devise a posture graph optimization module, leveraging the historical tracking results of the posture memory pool to optimize the tracking results and improve the occlusion robustness. Furthermore, we collect the Instrument3D dataset to comprehensively evaluate the 3D tracking of surgical instruments. The extensive experiments validate the superiority and scalability of our SurgTrack, by outperforming the state-of-the-arts with a remarkable improvement. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/wenwucode/SurgTrack.