Tracking of irregular graphical structures for tissue deformation recovery in minimally invasive surgery

Tissue deformation tracking is an important topic of minimally invasive surgery with applications ranging from intra-operative guidance to augmented reality visualisation. In this paper, we present a technique for visual tracking of irregular structures with an arbitrary degree of connectivity in space. The variational formulation of the proposed method ensures that correlation is maximised between tracked points and their computed new positions while the overall structure shape variation is minimised, thus maintaining spatial coherence of the tracked structure. The proposed method is applied to surgical annotation and tracking in 3D for telementoring and path-planning. The results are validated both on a CT-scanned phantom model and in vivo, showing an average alignment error of 1.79 mm (+/- 0.72 mm).