Fast and robust localization of surgical array using Kalman filter.

Problem: Intraoperative tracking of surgical instruments is an inevitable task of computer-assisted surgery. An optical tracking system often fails to precisely reconstruct the dynamic location and pose of a surgical tool due to the acquisition noise and measurement variance. Embedding a Kalman filter (KF) or any of its extensions such as extended and unscented Kalman filters (EKF and UKF) with the optical tracker resolves this issue by reducing the estimation variance and regularizing the temporal behavior.