Toward Monocular Camera-Guided Retinal Vein Cannulation with an Actively Stabilized Handheld Robot

In this paper we describe work towards retinal vessel cannulation using an actively stabilized handheld robot, guided by monocular vision. We employ a previously developed monocular camera based surface reconstruction method using automated laser beam scanning over the retina. We use the reconstructed plane to find a coordinate transform between the 2D image plane coordinate system and the global 3D frame. Within a hemispherical region around the target, we use motion scaling for higher precision. The contribution of this work is the homography matrix estimation using monocular vision and application of the previously developed laser surface reconstruction to Micron guided vein cannulation. Experiments are conducted in a wet eye phantom to show the higher accuracy of the surface reconstruction as compared to standard stereo reconstruction. Further, experiments to show the increased surgical accuracy due to motion scaling are also carried out.