Evaluation of Image Stabilization Methods in Robotic Beating Heart Surgery

In cardiopulmonary bypass surgery, it is beneficial to avoid the use of a heart-lung machine and perform beating heart surgery instead. This is a difficult task even for the most skilled surgeons. To eliminate the risks associated with cardiopulmonary bypass on a beating heart, a motion compensation system can be used. We place markers on the heart surface, which we can use to track the complex heart motion and to produce still footage of the heart surface by applying one of several stabilization algorithms to eliminate the motion. We compare six different stabilization algorithms, affine, Bspline, piecewise linear and three types of radial basis functions. In this paper, we evaluate the results using three evaluation methods, pixel intensity average difference, optical flow, and stabilized marker tracking. All of these show a significant reduction in motion after stabilization, especially for interpolation-based stabilization methods as opposed to the affine approximation. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of the different evaluation methods.