Target tracking in 3D ultrasound volumes by direct visual servoing (original) (raw)

Three dimensional ultrasound (3DUS) guided robotic beating heart surgery is an emerging computer-assisted surgical technique. Motion tracking of both the robot and the heart tissue is one of the key open problems in these procedures and the use of 3DUS imaging offers the possibility to extract, intra-operatively and in real time, the motion of one or more targets. In this paper, we present a visual servoing approach to track the motion of a single target that can consist of either the surgical robot or cardiac tissues. To deal with the low quality of the 3DUS volumes, the proposed intensity-based approach requires no primitive extraction or image segmentation. This approach does not involve time consuming processing steps and can be applied to a wide range of tissue types and medical instruments. Unlike previous work [1] where the motion compensation task was realized physically by moving the probe attached to a robotic arm to compensate for abdominal organ motion, we propose here t...