Robust 3D visual tracking for robotic-assisted cardiac interventions.

In the context of minimally invasive cardiac surgery, active vision-based motion compensation schemes have been proposed for mitigating problems related to physiological motion. However, robust and accurate visual tracking is a difficult task. The purpose of this paper is to present a hybrid tracker that estimates the heart surface deformation using the outputs of multiple visual tracking techniques. In the proposed method, the failure of an individual technique can be circumvented by the success of others, enabling the robust estimation of the heart surface deformation with increased spatial resolution. In addition, for coping with the absence of visual information due to motion blur or occlusions, a temporal heart motion model is incorporated as an additional support for the visual tracking task. The superior performance of the proposed technique compared to existing techniques individually is demonstrated through experiments conducted on recorded images of an in vivo minimally invasive CABG using the DaVinci robotic platform.