A triangular radial cubic spline deformation model for efficient 3D beating heart tracking

International audienceA novel deformable model is proposed for efficient 3D visual tracking of beating heart. The model is parameterized by the 3D coordinates of four control points: the three vertices and the circumcenter of a triangular target region. Nonlinear deformation on heart surfaces is handled by cubic spline interpolation based on radial pixel distances from the circumcenter. With a pre-computable design matrix, the model can be represented efficiently by a simple matrix equation. An iterative algorithm is developed based on the efficient second-order minimization to compute model parameters at each frame. The proposed tracking method is validated on the stereo-endoscopic videos of phantom heart and in vivo heart that are recorded by the da Vinci ® surgical system