Tracking micro tool in a dynamic 3D ultrasound situation using Kalman filter and RANSAC algorithm

Ultrasound guidance is used for many surgical applications such as biopsy and electrode insertion. This paper presents an improved method for tracking such micro tools inserted in human tissues. The RANSAC algorithm [1] has been implemented to detect the exact position of the needle in a stationary situation. In this paper, the Kalman filter is added to estimate the position of the needle in a dynamical situation. In the simulation, the RANSAC algorithm is used to get the position of the tip of the needle, and a speckle tracking method is implemented to estimate the inserting speed of the needle. The Kalman filter uses the results given by the two methods above as the measurement to make the estimation of the position of the needle tip. The simulated results show that both, in stationary and dynamic situations, the proposed method gives a more stable results than the RANSAC only algorithm.