title: Visual tracking of laparoscopic instruments in a Hough space.
abstract: This paper describes an approach to tracking laparoscopic instruments based solely on visual information. The two edges of the linear instrument are identified as maxima within a scalable search window in the Hough space. For each new frame the window is moved according to the velocity of the instrument computed in the previous frame. The computational cost of the Hough transform is further reduced by considering only edge features inside a mask determined by the Hough search window. The technique has been successfully applied in sequences of a simulation task and a surgical procedure.
authors.affiliation: Medical Physics Lab-Simulation Center, University of Athens, Greece. cloukas@med.uoa.gr
authors.forename: Constantinos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Loukas
authors.forename: Evangelos
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Georgiou
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D010535:Laparoscopy / Q000295:instrumentation*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated; D025321:Surgery, Computer-Assisted