Toward development of 3D surgical mouse paradigm

Popular usage of single endoscope and 2D viewing monitor in minimally invasive surgery (MIS) offer a natural requirement in developing a 3D interactive environment which can be integrated to assist the surgeons in an intuitive way. As such, development of the monocular-based image tracking of the surgical instruments becomes an essential step towards the development of such 3D surgical computer interface. In this paper, we study and analyze four possible methods for tracking instruments with a single endoscopic camera in an in-vitro setting. A 3D surgeon-computer interface is proposed as a future work which takes advantage of the above methods.