title: Tracking multiple surgical instruments in a near-infrared optical system.
abstract: Surgical navigation systems can assist doctors in performing more precise and more efficient surgical procedures to avoid various accidents. The near-infrared optical system (NOS) is an important component of surgical navigation systems. However, several surgical instruments are used during surgery, and effectively tracking all of them is challenging. A stereo matching algorithm using two intersecting lines and surgical instrument codes is proposed in this paper. In our NOS, the markers on the surgical instruments can be captured by two near-infrared cameras. After automatically searching and extracting their subpixel coordinates in the left and right images, the coordinates of the real and pseudo markers are determined by the two intersecting lines. Finally, the pseudo markers are removed to achieve accurate stereo matching by summing the codes for the distances between a specific marker with the other two markers on the surgical instrument. Experimental results show that the markers on the different surgical instruments can be automatically and accurately recognized. The NOS can accurately track multiple surgical instruments.
authors.affiliation: a School of Information Science and Technology, Zhongkai University of Agriculture and Engineering , Guangzhou , China.
authors.forename: Ken
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Cai
authors.affiliation: b Department of Biomedical Engineering , South China University of Technology , Guangzhou , China.
authors.forename: Rongqian
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: b Department of Biomedical Engineering , South China University of Technology , Guangzhou , China.
authors.forename: Qinyong
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: b Department of Biomedical Engineering , South China University of Technology , Guangzhou , China.
authors.forename: Zhigang
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D004867:Equipment Design; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D007259:Infrared Rays; D055096:Optical Devices; D025321:Surgery, Computer-Assisted / Q000295:instrumentation*; D013525:Surgical Instruments; D014584:User-Computer Interface
keywords: Multiple surgical instruments; near-infrared; stereo matching; surgical navigation