Towards Real-time Surface Tracking and Motion Compensation Integration for Robotic Surgery

The ability to negate tissue motion without complex physical constraints would greatly stabilize and benefit surgical operations involving frequent movements. Examples include beating heart surgery, procedures where respiration causes tissue movement, and in the case of physically unstable operating environments such as a battlefield, moving vehicle, underwater or space station. A calibrated stereo camera measures the 3-D position of an object with relation to any known frame, and subsequently its motion. Furthermore, modern stereo camera pairs can be packaged in small form factors, making them more amenable to physically constrained workspaces. In this work, a method for tracking physically simulated tissue motion was developed and analyzed to be implemented with the RAVEN II (TM)(1) surgical research robot for tissue motion compensation. Results are promising and reveal insights regarding tracking algorithm optimization, hardware limits, and are encouraging to extending this work to real-time with the incorporation of adequate computer hardware.