Image Stabilization with Model-Based Tracking for Beating Heart Surgery

Performing surgery on the beating heart has significant advantages compared to cardiopulmonary bypass. However, when performed directly, it is very demanding for the surgeon. As an alternative, using a teleoperated robot for compensating the heart motion has been proposed. As an addition, this paper describes how stabilized images are obtained to create the illusion of operating on a stationary heart. For that purpose, the heart motion is tracked with a stochastic physical model. Based on correspondences obtained by motion tracking, image stabilization is considered as a scattered data interpolation problem. The proposed algorithms are evaluated on a heart phantom and in in-vivo experiments on a porcine heart, which show that there is very little residual motion in the stabilized images.