A major limitation of minimally invasive surgery is the difficulty in accurately locating the internal anatomical structures of the target organ due to the lack of tactile feedback and transparency. Augmented reality (AR) offers a promising solution to overcome this challenge. Numerous studies have shown that combining learning-based and geometric methods can achieve accurate preoperative and intraoperative data registration. This work proposes a real-time monocular 3D tracking algorithm for post-registration tasks. The ORB-SLAM2 framework is adopted and modified for prior-based 3D tracking. The primitive 3D shape is used for fast initialization of the monocular SLAM. A pseudo-segmentation strategy is employed to separate the target organ from the background for tracking purposes, and the geometric prior of the 3D shape is incorporated as an additional constraint in the pose graph. Experiments from in-vivo and ex-vivo tests demonstrate that the proposed 3D tracking system provides robust 3D tracking and effectively handles typical challenges such as fast motion, out-of-field-of-view scenarios, partial visibility, and "organ-background" relative motion.

United Imaging, a global leader in advanced medical imaging and radiotherapy equipment, followed a strong appearance at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) with a win in a competition jointly organized by Facebook AI Research and NYU Langone Health. The company's United Imaging Intelligence America subsidiary led out of Boston won top prize in the multi-coil 4x acceleration category, a clinically relevant challenge designed to accelerate MRI scans using artificial intelligence (AI). "Using AI to create highly accurate images from significantly smaller amounts of raw data could result in much faster scans," commented Dr. Terrence Chen, CEO of United Imaging Intelligence America. "This could improve the patient experience and make scans more accessible." Fast and accurate MRI image reconstruction from under-sampled data is critically important in clinical practice.