Preliminary study of intracorporeal localization for endoscopy tracking

An intracorporeal optical tracking system for minimal invasive (MIS) surgery is proposed. MIS has been widely used in laparoscopic surgery since 1980s. Its advantages include small surgical cuts and short recovery time. However, because of the limited workspace and narrow view, MIS is more complicated and costs more time than open surgery. Therefore, the image-guided system plays an important role to give surgeons a better cognition, especially tracking the tip of the instruments. In this study, we proposed a novel approach which is based on intracorporeal optical tracking by using the optical markers with the endoscope. The approach can effectively immune from electromagnetic interference and achieve high tracking accuracy with average error of 1.1 mm.