Segmentation of surgical needles for fluoroscopy servoing using the insight software toolkit (ITK)

This paper presents recent work in segmenting surgical needles as seen under X-ray fluoroscopy. This work is part of developing a system for automatically aligning a surgical needle during minimally invasive interventions. The system incorporates a six degree-of-freedom robotic needle driver that is specifically designed for medical applications. The needle is segmented using methods from the insight software toolkit (ITK), which provides a public domain and open source implementation of state-of-the-art registration and segmentation algorithms.