A robust optical tracking system based on visible light for mixed reality guided surgery

Abstract Mixed reality-guided minimally invasive surgery (MRG-MIS) has shown great potential for clinical application, as it provides surgeons with direct and accurate intraoperative guidance, leading to improved treatment outcomes. Optical trackers play an important role in MRG-MIS and can influence the accuracy and effectiveness of these surgeries. In this research, we present a novel optical tracker based on visible light for MRG-MIS. A stereo-matching algorithm based on circular pose estimation reprojection was proposed to reduce the ghost reconstructed marker in stereo tracking. A marker identification algorithm based on the distance coding matrix was proposed to quickly find the target marker and obtain its pose in real time. A registration method was proposed to find the optimal rotation matrix between mixed reality coordinates and optical tracker coordinates. The 95% confidence interval for tracking distance accuracy was 0.11 mm, and the registration error in the phantom experiment using mixed reality guidance was 1.45 mm. The experimental results suggest that this present system achieves clinically acceptable accuracy and robustness compared with other MRG-MIS approaches.