Development of active IR-based surgical marker tracking and positioning systems

This paper presents an active vision based space-positioning robot (AVBSPR) for surgical navigation applications. The development of the proposed navigation robot consists of a five-axis SCROBOT-ER VII Robot, a stereoscopic based eye-in-hand image capture module and a set of infrared (IR) based surgical marker emitters. To increase the navigation space and to determine the best image capture orientation, a fuzzy inference engine is constructed to dynamically track the moving surgical markers. On the other hand, the stereoscopic image coordinates are used to calculate the 3D space coordinates of the surgical markers for surgical navigation applications. Finally, a prototype system had been implemented, and several experimental tests had been done. The experimental results showed that the robot tracks the surgical markers well, and the positioning error is around 5 mm within 2000 mm distance operating ranges.