Endoscope tracking in surgical navigation: preliminary comparison of da Vinci Xi kinematics and optical tracking

Accurate endoscope tracking is essential for registering reconstructed 3D models to the surgical view in image-guided robotic procedures. In this preliminary study, we quantitatively evaluated two tracking methods for a da Vinci Xi endoscope: robot kinematics and an external optical tracking system. A known checkerboard pattern was transformed into endoscope left-eye frame using transformations derived from both methods and then reprojected onto left-eye’s 2D image plane using camera parameters, and reprojection error was computed against the ground truth detected by OpenCV. Results demonstrate that the optical tracker achieves significantly higher accuracy than kinematics (RMSE: 2.952 pixels < 5.692 pixels, p = 0.0163), providing guidance for tracking strategies in future surgical systems.