Hybrid optical and electromagnetic method for medical instrument tracking application

This paper addresses the problem of establishing hybrid instrument tracking using optical and electromagnetic devices for therapeutic application. Concretely, the hybrid tracking method is a video tracking system based on tracking a uniquely designed marker, and present a scenario where the electromagnetic system can be combined with the video based system to obtain a cost-effective system. A developed objective function is adopted to merge tensor representing the 3-D locations of optical and electromagnetic signals and, estimated instruments trajectory, updated simultaneously using Kalman filter. The proposed approach has been implemented and shows the results on both synthetic and animal data.