System for Tracking of Surgical Tools and Assessment of Surgical Skills Using Continuously Adaptive Mean Shift Methodology

A tracking system that serves as a tool for tracking the movement of surgical instruments has been developed. The system tracks color markers on the surgical instruments. The Continuously Adaptive Mean Shift (CAMSHIFT) methodology was employed for tool tracking and a total distance traversed by the surgical instrument of interest was calculated. Two cameras were used to record the motion of the tool and the software developed was used to track the movement of markers on the tools over subsequent frames. The information thus derived from the two views of cameras was used to calculate the three dimensional coordinates of the location of the marker on the instrument and subsequently the distance traversed. MATLAB, which is a commercial software package, was used to implement the tool tracking algorithm and for developing the GUI (Graphic User Interface). Data was collected using Commercial off the shelf (COTS) camera hardware and processing was done on a 2.2 GHz, 512 MB RAM Intel Pentium 4 computer