Generic visibility simulation for designing optical tracker in image-guided surgery

Optical tracking with its high accuracy is widely used to determine the position and orientation of a surgical instrument in image-guided surgery (IGS). During tracking, optical markers are detected and identified by the optical tracking system. Due to individual geometric arrangement of the markers and design of the tracker body, there may be unexpected visibility reduction within the required visible range. This is mostly caused by coverage or overlapping through tracker's own geometry. This paper is concerned with a generic modeling of the visibility of markers and simulation of tracker visibility in a defined angle range. The visibilities of two trackers are analyzed with simulation and experimental measurement. The results show that it is possible to predict the visibility range of an arbitrary tracker with arbitrary distribution of optical markers. This method may be useful for designing optical tracker with complex geometric configuration.