Characterization of a 6 DOF acoustic-inertial navigation system for minimally-invasive surgery

A highly accurate 6 DOF real-time navigation system for minimally-invasive surgical interventions is presented. The system consists of short range acoustic transducers that combine time-of-flight and carrier-phase measurements and a standard inertial measurement unit. With Hybrid Extended Kalman Filtering, a precise pose estimation of the surgical instrument is achieved. In this contribution, simulation results focussing on different noise variances, which are experimentally obtained from a prototype setup, and initial errors are presented. In addition to previous work, the main advance lies in the estimate of the orientation of the laparoscopic instrument through the use of multiple acoustic transducers.