Stabilization of image motion for robotic assisted beating heart surgery.

The performance of robotic assisted minimally invasive beating heart surgery is a challenging task due to the rhythmic motion of the heart, which hampers delicate tasks such as small vessel anastomosis. In this paper, a virtual motion compensation scheme is proposed for stabilizing images from the surgical site. The method uses vision based 3D tracking to accurately infer cardiac surface deformation and augmented reality for rendering a motion stabilized view for improved surgical performance. The method forgoes the need of fiducial markers and can be integrated with the existing master-slave robotic consoles. The proposed technique is validated with both simulated surgical scenes with known ground truth and in vivo data acquired from a TECAB procedure. The experimental results demonstrate the potential of the proposed technique in performing microscale tasks in a moving frame of reference with improved precision and repeatability.