Markerless monocular tracking system for guided external eye surgery

Carlos Monserrat Aranda, María José Rupérez, Mariano Alcañiz Raya, J. Mataix

Abstract: This paper presents a novel markerless monocular tracking system aimed at guiding ophthalmologists during external eye surgery. This new tracking system performs a very accurate tracking of the eye by detecting invariant points using only textures that are present in the sclera, i.e., without using traditional features like the pupil and/or cornea reflections, which remain partially or totally occluded in most surgeries. Two known algorithms that compute invariant points and correspondences between pairs of images were implemented in our system: Scalable Invariant Feature Transforms (SIFT) and Speed Up Robust Features (SURF). The results of experiments performed on phantom eyes show that, with either algorithm, the developed system tracks a sphere at a 360° rotation angle with an error that is lower than 0.5%. Some experiments have also been carried out on images of real eyes showing promising behavior of the system in the presence of blood or surgical instruments during real eye surgery. Previous article in issue Next article in issue