Surgical navigation has proven to be an effective approach for providing real-time guidance and visualization of relevant information by estimating the pose of the patient’s anatomy and surgical tools. During navigated surgery, instruments are commonly equipped with fiducial markers and tracked by stationary optical tracking systems (OTS) to provide accurate navigation cues. Augmented Reality (AR) has been adopted for intuitive visual guidance, even motivating several efforts to enable surgical instrument tracking through built-in sensors on Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs). However, existing tracking methods typically require a direct line-of-sight to instruments, which is challenging to maintain in dynamic surgical environments due to frequent occlusions caused by moving medical equipment, surgical tools, and personnel. To address this challenge, this work introduces a novel framework capable of tracking surgical instruments even under occlusion by fusing different sensors in a dynamic scene graph representation. Our framework uniquely combines tracking systems with varying degrees of accuracy, providing real-time assessments of tracking reliability to the user. Unlike conventional sensor fusion approaches that are heavily dependent on specific sensor modalities, the proposed method is agnostic to tracking device modality and robust to their motion states (e.g., stationary OTS versus dynamic AR-HMD). Experimental results demonstrate that our dynamic scene graph framework successfully integrates and optimizes measurements from multiple tracking sources, significantly enhancing AR visualization consistency and accuracy with robustness under occlusion.

Robotic-assisted medical systems (RAMS) have gained significant attention for their advantages in alleviating surgeons’ fatigue and improving patients’ outcomes. These systems comprise a range of human-computer interactions, including medical scene monitoring, anatomical target planning, and robot manipulation. However, despite its versatility and effectiveness, RAMS demands expertise in robotics, leading to a high learning cost for the operator. In this work, we introduce a novel framework using mixed reality technologies to ease the use of RAMS. The proposed framework achieves real-time planning and execution of medical instruments by providing 3D anatomical image overlay, human-robot collision detection, and robot programming interface. These features, integrated with an easy-to-use calibration method for head-mounted display, improve the effectiveness of human-robot interactions. To assess the feasibility of the framework, two medical applications are presented in this work: 1) coil placement during transcranial magnetic stimulation and 2) drill and injector device positioning during femoroplasty. Results from these use cases demonstrate its potential to extend to a wider range of medical scenarios.

Hand-eye calibration is the problem of solving the transformation from the end-effector of a robot to the sensor attached to it. Commonly employed techniques, such as AXXB or AXZB formulations, rely on regression methods that require collecting pose data from different robot configurations, which can produce low accuracy and repeatability. However, the derived transformation should solely depend on the geometry of the end-effector and the sensor attachment. We propose Geometry-Based End-Effector Calibration (GBEC) that enhances the repeatability and accuracy of the derived transformation compared to traditional hand-eye calibrations. To demonstrate improvements, we apply the approach to two different robot-assisted procedures: Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) and femoroplasty. We also discuss the generalizability of GBEC for camera-in-hand and marker-in-hand sensor mounting methods. In the experiments, we perform GBEC between the robot end-effector and an optical tracker’s rigid body marker attached to the TMS coil or femoroplasty drill guide. Previous research documents low repeatability and accuracy of the conventional methods for robot-assisted TMS hand-eye calibration. Applying GBEC to repeated calibrations, we obtain transformations with standard deviations of 0.37mm, 0.65mm, and 0.40mm (translation) along x, y, and z axes of the end-effector, respectively. The tool alignment experiments after using GBEC achieve a mean accuracy around 0.2mm in Euclidean distance. When compared to some existing methods, the proposed method relies solely on the geometry of the flange and the pose of the rigid-body marker, making it independent of workspace constraints or robot accuracy, without sacrificing the orthogonality of the rotation matrix. Our results validate the accuracy and applicability of the approach, providing a new and generalizable methodology for obtaining the transformation from the end-effector to a sensor.

Realtime shape estimation of continuum objects and manipulators is essential for developing accurate planning and control paradigms. The existing methods that create dense point clouds from camera images, and/or use distinguishable markers on a deformable body have limitations in realtime tracking of large continuum objects/manipulators. The physical occlusion of markers can often compromise accurate shape estimation. We propose a robust method to estimate the shape of linear deformable objects in realtime using scattered and unordered key points. By utilizing a robust probability-based labeling algorithm, our approach identifies the true order of the detected key points and then reconstructs the shape using piecewise spline interpolation. The approach only relies on knowing the number of the key points and the interval between two neighboring points. We demonstrate the robustness of the method when key points are partially occluded. The proposed method is also integrated into a simulation in Unity for tracking the shape of a cable with a length of 1m and a radius of 5mm. The simulation results show that our proposed approach achieves an average length error of 1.07% over the continuum’s centerline and an average cross-section error of 2.11mm. The real-world experiments of tracking and estimating a heavy-load cable prove that the proposed approach is robust under occlusion and complex entanglement scenarios.