Development of a surgical navigation robot using image servo tracking techniques

This paper presents the development of surgical navigation robot, which is designed based on the image servo tracking technique. The surgical navigation robot plays an important role to the computer aided surgery (CAS), since it provides the patient's space coordinate during surgical navigation stage in real-time. Especially, the proposed active image servo tracking based surgical navigation robot can track the surgical marker that is mounted on the patient's hard tissue of the surgical position, so that the navigation space can be automatically extended. The proposed surgical navigation robot system consists of the in-lab designed dual-axis eye-in-hand robot (EIHR), digital signal processor (DSP) based EIHR motion controller, image servo tracking and positioning software. The EIHR robot is composed of the dual-axis robot mechanics and two CCD cameras, which acts as the stereoscopic image capture platform. The DSP based EIHR motion controller is designed to control the EIHR robot in a desired velocity, so that the surgical marker can be dynamically tracked. The image servo tracking and positioning software is the kernel of this work, and it is composed of image capture and recognition module, fuzzy logic based surgical marker tracking module and surgical marker positioning module. The image capture and recognition module is developed to abstract the image features of the surgical marker. The intelligent fuzzy logic based surgical marker tracking module is capable of generating robot's control command so that the surgical marker can be tracked within the desired target window. In addition, the surgical marker positioning module is used to calculate the surgical marker's space coordinates in terms of the features of stereoscopic images and the robot's posture. Finally, the prototype had been finished, and the experiment results showed that proposed EIHR achieved 1.7 mm position error within 500 mm operation range.