SurgCalib: Gaussian Splatting-Based Hand-Eye Calibration for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery

This work presents an RGB-D imaging-based approach to marker-free hand-eye calibration using a novel implementation of the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm with a robust point-to-plane (PTP) objective formulated on a Lie algebra. Its applicability is demonstrated through comprehensive experiments using three well known serial manipulators and two RGB-D cameras. With only three randomly chosen robot configurations, our approach achieves approximately 90% successful calibrations, demonstrating 2-3x higher convergence rates to the global optimum compared to both marker-based and marker-free baselines. We also report 2 orders of magnitude faster convergence time (0.8 +/- 0.4 s) for 9 robot configurations over other marker-free methods. Our method exhibits significantly improved accuracy (5 mm in task space) over classical approaches (7 mm in task space) whilst being marker-free. The benchmarking dataset and code are open sourced under Apache 2.0 License, and a ROS 2 integration with robot abstraction is provided to facilitate deployment.

Accurate and efficient tracking of surgical instruments is fundamental for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery. Although vision-based robot pose estimation has enabled markerless calibration without tedious physical setups, reliable tool tracking for surgical robots still remains challenging due to partial visibility and specialized articulation design of surgical instruments. Previous works in the field are usually prone to unreliable feature detections under degraded visual quality and data scarcity, whereas rendering-based methods often struggle with computational costs and suboptimal convergence. In this work, we incorporate CMA-ES, an evolutionary optimization strategy, into a versatile tracking pipeline that jointly estimates surgical instrument pose and joint configurations. Using batch rendering to efficiently evaluate multiple pose candidates in parallel, the method significantly reduces inference time and improves convergence robustness. The proposed framework further generalizes to joint angle-free and bi-manual tracking settings, making it suitable for both vision feedback control and online surgery video calibration. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms prior approaches in both accuracy and runtime. Source code and data are available at https://github.com/hanyang-hu/online_dvrk_tracking.

This paper presents the computational architecture and quantitative preclinical evaluation of MIRAGE, a multimodal image-guided robotic surgery framework for real-time visualization and navigation. It integrates stereovision scene reconstruction, augmented-reality (AR) video overlay, quantified heads-up display (HUD) navigation, and intraoperative ultrasound within the da Vinci console's TilePro display (Intuitive Surgical). Additional modules include optical/electromagnetic tracker registration, stereo calibration, fiducial rigid registration with RMSE feedback, and 3D point-cloud reconstruction. Video I/O and rendering run in a C++ backend, while a Python GUI coordinates calibration, registration, reconstruction, visualization, and user interaction through an in-process zero-copy binding layer. The framework formalizes spatial transforms, module states, and synchronization of heterogeneous video and tracking streams. Preoperative calibration uses synchronized checkerboard image pairs and optimization, with estimated intrinsics, extrinsics, and rectification reused intraoperatively. MIRAGE was validated in phantom experiments across da Vinci S, Si, Xi, and SP platforms. Across clinically relevant working distances, mean 3D reprojection error was 0.6mm, with best 0.1mm RMSE at 100mm on Xi. Results support MIRAGE as a preclinical technical-validation platform for accurate, responsive, and extensible multimodal surgical guidance.