A new method of surgical tracking system based on fiducial marker

Abstract

Now used commercial surgical tracking devicessuch as near-infrared optical tracking system is ofcomplex system, non-multi-target tracking and weak anti-interference ability. A low-cost and accurate surgical tracking system based on the artificial markers was proposed in our study for the real-time tracking of surgical tools. Bumblebee2 binocular vision camera system is used to capturing pictures for stereo vision process. We adopt ARTag fiducial marker system in our tracking system. A robust and fast ARTag detecting algorithm is proposed and this edge based approach is proved to be fast and robust with the conducted experiments. A relative algorithm for the registration of surgical tools with the test boarder is also proposed to realize and test the tracking system. Experiments are conducted to test the performance of the tracking system. We judge the tracking accuracy by the error of the distance between two near corner points, and the tracking stability by the location error of the same corner point with different tool postures. Results show that the mean error of the distance between two adjacent corners points is 0.40 mm, mean error with stable tip of different marker rotation is 0.12 mm, which is comparable to the common used optical tracking system.