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An Accurate Recognition of Infrared Retro-Reflective Markers in Surgical Navigation

  • Systems-Level Quality Improvement
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Abstract

Marker-based optical tracking systems (OTS) are widely used in clinical image-guided therapy. However, the emergence of ghost markers, which is caused by the mistaken recognition of markers and the incorrect correspondences between marker projections, may lead to tracking failures for these systems. Therefore, this paper proposes a strategy to prevent the emergence of ghost markers by identifying markers based on the features of their projections, finding the correspondences between marker projections based on the geometric information provided by markers, and fast-tracking markers in a 2D image between frames based on the sizes of their projections. Apart from validating its high robustness, the experimental results show that the proposed strategy can accurately recognize markers, correctly identify their correspondences, and meet the requirements of real-time tracking.

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Funding

This study was supported by the National Natural Scientific Foundation of China (81671788), the Guangdong Provincial Science and Technology Program (2016A020220006, 2017B020210008, and 2017B010110015), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2017 M612671), the Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities (2017ZD082, x2yxD2182720), the Guangzhou Science and Technology Program (201704020228), and the Chinese Scholarship Fund (201806155010).

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Author notes

  1. Han Wu and Qinyong Lin Authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomedical Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

    Han Wu, Qinyong Lin, Rongqian Yang, Yuan Zhou, Lingxiang Zheng, Yueshan Huang & Yonghua Lao

  2. School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 06520, USA

    Rongqian Yang

  3. Guangdong Engineering Technology Research Center for Translational Medicine of Mental Disorders, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

    Rongqian Yang

  4. Guangzhou Aimooe Technology Co., Ltd., Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

    Zhigang Wang

  5. Sun Yat-Sen University Cancer Center, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

    Jinhua Huang

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  1. Han Wu
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  2. Qinyong Lin
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  4. Yuan Zhou
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  9. Jinhua Huang
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Correspondence to Rongqian Yang.

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Wu, H., Lin, Q., Yang, R. et al. An Accurate Recognition of Infrared Retro-Reflective Markers in Surgical Navigation. J Med Syst 43, 153 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-019-1257-x

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