Efficient 3D tracking for motion compensation in beating heart surgery.

The design of physiological motion compensation systems for robotic-assisted cardiac Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is a challenging research topic. In this domain, vision-based techniques have proven to be a practical way to retrieve the motion of the beating heart. However due to the complexity of the heart motion and its surface characteristics, efficient tracking is still a complicated task. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for tracking the 3D motion of the beating heart, based on a Thin-Plate Splines (TPS) parametric model. The novelty of our approach lies in that no explicit matching between the stereo camera images is required and consequently no intermediate steps such as rectification are needed. Experiments conducted on ex-vivo and in-vivo tissue show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for tracking surfaces undergoing complex deformations.