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Occlusion-Robust Markerless Surgical Instrument Pose Estimation
  • Haozheng Xu,
  • Stamatia Giannarou
Haozheng Xu
Imperial College London

Corresponding Author:haozheng.xu19@imperial.ac.uk

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Stamatia Giannarou
Imperial College London
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Abstract

The estimation of the pose of surgical instruments is important in Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RMIS) to assist surgical navigation and enable autonomous robotic task execution. The performance of current instrument pose estimation methods deteriorates significantly in the presence of partial tool visibility, occlusions, and changes in the surgical scene. In this work, a vision-based framework is proposed for markerless estimation of the 6DoF pose of surgical instruments. To deal with partial instrument visibility, a keypoint object representation is used and stable and accurate instrument poses are computed using a PnP solver. To boost the learning process of the model under occlusion, a new mask-based data augmentation approach has been proposed. To validate our model, a dataset for instrument pose estimation with highly accurate ground truth data has been generated using different surgical robotic instruments. The proposed network can achieve submillimeter accuracy and our experimental results verify its generalisability to different shapes of occlusion.
31 Oct 2024Submitted to Healthcare Technology Letters
04 Nov 2024Submission Checks Completed
04 Nov 2024Assigned to Editor
07 Nov 2024Reviewer(s) Assigned
08 Nov 2024Review(s) Completed, Editorial Evaluation Pending
12 Nov 2024Editorial Decision: Accept