Accuracy Verification of Knife Tip Position Estimation for Liver Surgery Support System

Our surgical support system can issue a warning when the surgical knife approaches that should not be cut, e.g. a large blood vessel. It can also navigate the knife-tip to appropriately resect a tumor. Our system estimates the position and orientation of the surgical knife and the target organ using two different distance sensors during surgery. The distance between the knife-tip and the blood vessels inside the organ is measured. In this paper, we report the verification of accuracy of the knife-tip position estimation. The experimental results show that the position estimation error of the knife-tip is 0.3 mm and the standard deviation is 0.3 mm.