Towards markerless computer assisted surgery: Application to total knee arthroplasty.

Purpose: A new approach is proposed to localise surgical instruments for Computer Assisted Orthopaedic Surgery (CAOS) that aims at overpassing the limitations of conventional CAOS solutions. This approach relies on both a depth sensor and a 6D pose estimation algorithm.

Methods: The Point-Pair Features (PPF) algorithm was used to estimate the pose of a Patient-Specific Instrument (PSI) for Total Knee Arthroplasty (TKA).