Instrument localization is widely used in computer-assisted surgery. Most existing navigation systems monitor the position of the surgical instrument’s stylus-tip in non-visible surgical areas. However, a gap still exists in meeting the surgeons’ requirements for instrument monitoring. It is difficult for them to monitor the instrument’s working direction and its contact with the lesion area without an intuitive silhouette or additional feature points on the instrument. This paper introduces a full-tool surgical navigation for enhancing instrument localization and visualization in surgery, providing silhouette monitoring and directional indications. The key to overcoming these challenges lies in reconstructing the surgical instrument, as well as calibrating the stylus-tip and direction of the key part on the instrument. Our method achieves this through a silhouette carving reconstruction method with a feature-dense position-sensing marker. In the experiment, the fiducial registration error of our method reaches 0.496 mm, and the relative orientation error is 1.401°. These localization and orientation accuracies demonstrate the potential of full-tool navigation system in surgeries.
Lin et al. (Tue,) studied this question.