Robust laparoscopic instruments tracking using colored strips

To assist surgeons in the acquisition of the required skills for the proper execution of the laparoscopic procedure, surgical simulators are used. During training with simulators it is useful to provide a surgical performance quantitative evaluation. Recent research works showed that such evaluation can be obtained by tracking the laparoscopic instruments, using only the images provided by the laparoscope and without hindering the surgical scene. In this work the state of the art method is improved so that a robust tracking can run even with the noisy background provided by realistic simulators. The method was validated by comparison with the tracking of a “chess-board” pattern and following tests were performed to check the robustness of the developed algorithm. Despite the noisy environment, the implemented method was found to be able to track the tip of the surgical instrument with a good accuracy compared to the other studies in the literature.