Calibration of Surgical Knife-Tip Position with Marker-Based Optical Tracking Camera and Precise Evaluation of Its Measurement Accuracy

Abstract: We have been developing a liver surgery support system in collaboration with Kansai Medical University Hospital. Our surgical support system issues a warning when the surgical knife approaches a vital nerve or large blood vessel that should not be cut. It is also able to navigate the knife-tip to appropriately resect a tumor. Our system estimates the position and orientation of the surgical knife and the target organ using two distance cameras during surgery. The distance between the knife-tip and the blood vessels inside the organ is measured in real-time. In this paper, we present the details of our liver surgery support system and report the accuracy of the knife-tip positioning. The experimental results show that the position estimation error of the knife-tip is 0.3 mm and the standard deviation is 0.3 mm. The error of the distance between the estimated knife-tip positions on the neighboring grid points was 0.1 mm. This result satisfies the doctor's surgical requirement. Keywords: Surgical knife positioning; Calibration; Liver; AccuracyApplied Science and Computer Science Publication