Towards Markerless Intraoperative Tracking of Deformable Spine Tissue

Abstract: Consumer-grade RGB-D imaging for intraoperative orthopedic tissue tracking is a promising method with high translational potential. Unlike bone-mounted tracking devices, markerless tracking can reduce operating time and complexity. However, its use has been limited to cadaveric studies. This paper introduces the first real-world clinical RGB-D dataset for spine surgery and develops SpineAlign, a system for capturing deformation between preoperative and intraoperative spine states. We also present an intraoperative segmentation network trained on this data and introduce CorrespondNet, a multi-task framework for predicting key regions for registration in both intraoperative and preoperative scenes.