Tracking a Real Liver Using a Virtual Liver and an Experimental Evaluation with Kinect v2

In this study, we propose a smart transcription algorithm for translation and/or rotation motions. This algorithm has two phases: calculating the differences between real and virtual 2D depth images, and searching the motion space defined by three translation and three rotation degrees of freedom based on the depth differences. One depth image is captured for a real liver using a Kinect v2 depth camera and another depth image is obtained for a virtual liver (a polyhedron in stereo-lithography (STL) format by z-buffering with a graphics processing unit). The STL data are converted from Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) data, where the DICOM data are captured from a patient's liver using magnetic resonance imaging and/or a computed tomography scanner. In this study, we evaluated the motion precision of our proposed algorithm based on several experiments based using a Kinect v2 depth camera.