Towards Markerless 3D Pose Estimation for Computer Assisted Orthopaedic Surgery: a Comparison Study of Depth Cameras

This abstract addresses the problem of localizing surgical instruments during orthopaedic surgeries. Compared to usual approaches based on surgical navigation with markers, we propose here a novel method that estimates the 6-DoF pose of surgical instruments without specific markers using a depth camera. The goal of this paper is to compare, on real data, the registration precision of an algorithm called Point Pair Features (PPF) according to consumer depth cameras available on the market. Experimental validation using sawbones has been conducted and 8 cameras have been tested in realistic clinical environment. The Kinect Azure reports the best precision with a registration error of 1.13mm ± 1.00mm.

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