3D orientation and position tracking system of surgical instrument with optical tracker and internal vision sensor

When surgical instruments are tracked in an image-guided surgical navigation system, a stereo vision system with high accuracy is generally used, which is called optical tracker. However, this optical tracker has the disadvantage that a line-of-sight between the tracker and surgical instrument must be maintained. Therefore, to complement the disadvantage of optical tracking systems, an internal vision sensor is attached to a surgical instrument in this paper. Monitoring the target marker pattern attached on patient with this vision sensor, this surgical instrument is possible to be tracked even when the line-of-sight of the optical tracker is occluded. To verify the system's effectiveness, a series of basic experiments is carried out. Lastly, an integration experiment is conducted. The experimental results show that rotational error is bounded to max 1.32° and mean 0.35°, and translation error is in max 1.72mm and mean 0.58mm. Finally, it is confirmed that the proposed tool tracking method using an internal vision sensor is useful and effective to overcome the occlusion problem of the optical tracker.