Towards an Accurate Augmented-Reality-Assisted Orthopedic Surgical Robotic System Using Bidirectional Generalized Point Set Registration

This paper presents a novel augmented reality (AR)-assisted orthopedic surgical robotic system based on Head-Mounted Display (HMD) devices. The proposed system can overlay the preoperative plans over the patient's anatomy and provide useful guidance for surgeons during interventions, with integrated calibration and registration components. A novel bi-directional generalised point set registration algorithm that utilises robust features is developed to accurately align the pre-operative CT and intra-operative patient spaces, which has been demonstrated to outperform existing registration methods. The efficacy of the system is both qualitatively and quantitatively assessed with an in vitro study simulating a total knee arthroplasty (TKA) procedure. The experimental results showed that 1) the system can successfully align the preoperative and intraoperative spaces, with the mean target registration error (TRE) being 2.7771 mm; 2) the models can be properly overlaid to the physical scenarios with the mean AR visualization accuracy being 6.9726 mm.