Utilization of low cost motion capture cameras for virtual navigation Procedures: Performance evaluation for surgical navigation

Thanks to recent advances in medical robotics, various traditional surgical procedures have been started to be carried out by the help of robot manipulators. In order to enhance visual feedback and operation efficiency in these scenarios, utilization of virtual navigation techniques with specialized hardware has become a widespread choice. On the other hand, relatively high equipment costs have risks to slow down researches and mass adoption on the field. In light of this, current study represents performance evaluation of a low cost motion capture cameras on a scenario that tries to demonstrate robotic surgery like operation on a target patient through virtual navigation. Throughout the study least squares point based registration technique was utilized to correlate different reference frames with each other. A new approach was proposed for the calibration between robot manipulator and motion capture system to allow operation without using markers on manipulator side. Innovative patient mockup design with precisely formed landmark points was also introduced in order to verify performances of utilized low cost hardware. At the end of the study, hardware verification results showed the possibility of sub millimeter precisions in demonstrated navigation procedures.