Minimally invasive surgeries, such as arthroscopic (keyhole) surgeries, have grown in popularity
due to the promise of faster recovery times and causing less pain. A typical keyhole surgery
setup involves a camera that captures the movement of a surgical tool and displays it on a
monitor. During the surgery, it is easy to lose a sense of scale in translation and orientation of
the tool. Currently, the surgeon uses their extremely refined intuition to navigate the anatomy.
However, the limitations described could reduce the reliability and accuracy of the procedure,
leading to complications after the surgery. To address this challenge, the TrackAR team is
partnering with Arthrex California Technology to provide more spatial awareness to the surgeon.
Our proposed method uses optical trackers called artificial reality (AR) tags placed on the
surgical tool. A live camera feed paired with a computer vision algorithm would allow us to
compute the position and angle of the markers and display information about the surgical tooltip.
Doing so could greatly improve the quality of the repair and thus the outcome of the procedure.