Marker-less real-time intra-operative camera and hand-eye calibration procedure for surgical augmented reality

Accurate medical Augmented Reality (AR) rendering requires two calibrations, a camera intrinsic matrix estimation and a hand-eye transformation. We present a unified, practical, marker-less, real-time system to estimate both these transformations during surgery. For camera calibration we perform cal...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Megha Kalia, Prateek Mathur, Nassir Navab, Septimiu E. Salcudean
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2019-10-01
Series:Healthcare Technology Letters
Subjects:
Online Access:https://digital-library.theiet.org/content/journals/10.1049/htl.2019.0094
Description
Summary:Accurate medical Augmented Reality (AR) rendering requires two calibrations, a camera intrinsic matrix estimation and a hand-eye transformation. We present a unified, practical, marker-less, real-time system to estimate both these transformations during surgery. For camera calibration we perform calibrations at multiple distances from the endoscope, pre-operatively, to parametrize the camera intrinsic matrix as a function of distance from the endoscope. Then, we retrieve the camera parameters intra-operatively by estimating the distance of the surgical site from the endoscope in less than 1 s. Unlike in prior work, our method does not require the endoscope to be taken out of the patient; for the hand-eye calibration, as opposed to conventional methods that require the identification of a marker, we make use of a rendered tool-tip in 3D. As the surgeon moves the instrument and observes the offset between the actual and the rendered tool-tip, they can select points of high visual error and manually bring the instrument tip to match the virtual rendered tool tip. To evaluate the hand-eye calibration, 5 subjects carried out the hand-eye calibration procedure on a da Vinci robot. Average Target Registration Error of approximately 7mm was achieved with just three data points.
ISSN:2053-3713