MANGO: low-cost open source needle guidance

Abstract

Validating experiments in intra-operative planning for percutaneous interventions requires to localize the needle with a tracking system. As commercial optical trackers are expensive, we present MANGO, a low-cost OpenSource solution for needle tracking. We first present the design of our system, which localizes colored orbs using a stereo-camera setup. Based on this setup, we investigate the static and dynamic error of the system, and experiment with signal filtering to improve tracking performance. With the MANGO, we are able to meet the positional accuracy margin of 5 mm usually required in percutaneous interventions. Orientational accuracy, measured by needle tip localization accuracy as a proxy measure, exceeds this margin. We plan to investigate this further in future research. Releasing our code, data and 3D models, we aim to provide a low-cost and reproducible platform for needle tracking and validation of intra-operative planning in research environments.