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One of the minimally invasive cardiac surgery procedures is valvuloplasty for mitral regurgitation. Valvuloplasty uses an artificial tendon cord to replace the torn tendon cord and a valvuloplasty ring to correct the enlargement of the valve ring. The appropriate positions for embedding the artificial tendon cord and the annuloplasty ring are marked with dyes during surgery, but the endoscopic view is narrow and may be obscured by surgical instruments. In this study, we propose a system that estimates and displays the position of hidden markers using the coordinates of the center of gravity of each marker and the positional relationship between markers during the surgery. First, the spectral reflectance is estimated from color images obtained from a stereo endoscope and the marker areas are extracted. Next, the 3D information of the marker area is estimated using the stereo method, and the position of the center of gravity is calculated for each marker. Then, inter-frame matching is performed using the contours of the markers to detect hidden markers. Finally, the relationship between the calculated center-of-gravity positions for each marker is used to estimate the center of gravity positions of the hidden markers. The effectiveness of the proposed method was confirmed by estimating the center of gravity of markers in the blind spot using an image of a marker drawn on a pig's heart fragment, which was designed to look like a valve. The proposed system can compensate for the blind spots by estimating the position of the hidden markers during surgery.
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