An optical tracker based registration method using feedback for robot-assisted insertion surgeries

Robot-assisted needle insertion technology is now widely used in minimally invasive surgeries. The success of these surgeries highly depends on the accuracy of the position and orientation estimation of the needle tip. In this paper, we proposed an optical tracker based registration method for the marker-robot-needle tip registration in a robot-assisted needle insertion surgery. The method consists of two steps. First, with the guide of the optical tracker, we use the motion vector from the marker's current position to its target point as a feedback control to automatically register the robot-marker and the robot-tracker coordinates respectively. Then, in the procedure of marker-needle tip registration, we use two points on the needle holder to achieve a high accuracy needle orientation registration. We have conducted a series of experiments for the proposed method on a verified platform. Results show that the position estimation error is below 0.5mm and the orientation estimation error is below 0.5 degrees.