Towards Occlusion-Free Surgical Instrument Tracking: A Modular Monocular Approach and an Agile Calibration Method

Optical means of instrument tracking has been widely used in image-guided interventions and considered the de facto standard for tracking rigid bodies with a direct line-of-sight. However, the occlusion problem which remains unresolved in current systems frustrates surgeons during the operation. To address this challenge, we propose a surgical instrument tracking system based on multiple reconfigurable monocular modules. The main approach is to enable the system to dynamically reconfigure the multiple monocular modules when occlusion occurs partially within the workspace. In this paper, we focus on the system architecture and an agile multicamera calibration method which only uses the customized tool for the surgical instrument tracking scenario. Additionally, two fast non-iterative algorithms are proposed and studied. In order to show the feasibility and superiority of the corresponding multicamera calibration algorithm, comparison experiments have carried out. The intensive investigation results give a practical instruction to the real implementation of the proposed system in image-guided interventions.