A preliminary study on surgical instrument tracking based on multiple modules of monocular pose estimation

Optical means of instrument tracking technology have been widely used in image-guided surgery and regarded as the de facto standard for tracking rigid bodies under the constraint of direct line-of-sight. It remains unresolved for optical tracking to have the innate drawbacks, such as the bulky volume, the line-of-sight requirement and the occlusion constraint, etc., although they have been successful in clinical scenarios. To address these challenges in this article, we propose a surgical instrument tracking system based on dynamic configuration of multiple monocular pose estimation modules. The main approach is to enable the system to dynamically reconfigure the multiple vision sensors when occlusion occurs partially within the workspace. The corresponding multi-camera calibration algorithm and multi-camera based instrument tracking method are proposed and the evaluation experiments are carried out.