# EyeLS: Shadow-Guided Instrument Landing System for Intraocular Target Approaching in Robotic Eye Surgery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08799 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08799/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Autonomously Navigating a Surgical Tool Inside the Eye by Learning from Demonstration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07785/) (2020)
- [Towards Autonomous Eye Surgery by Combining Deep Imitation Learning with Optimal Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07778/) (2020)
- [Fast 5DOF Needle Tracking in iOCT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06446/) (2018)
- [Robotic Navigation Autonomy for Subretinal Injection via Intelligent Real-Time Virtual iOCT Volume Slicing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07204/) (2023)
- [Autonomous Coordinated Control of the Light Guide for Positioning in Vitreoretinal Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11985/) (2021)
- [Autonomous Needle Navigation in Retinal Microsurgery: Evaluation in ex vivo Porcine Eyes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11839/) (2023)
- [Vitreoretinal Surgical Robotic System with Autonomous Orbital Manipulation using Vector-Field Inequalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05567/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robotic ophthalmic surgery is an emerging technology to facilitate high-precision interventions such as retina penetration in subretinal injection and removal of floating tissues in retinal detachment depending on the input imaging modalities such as microscopy and intraoperative OCT (iOCT). Although iOCT is explored to locate the needle tip within its range-limited ROI, it is still difficult to coordinate iOCT's motion with the needle, especially at the initial target-approaching stage. Meanwhile, due to 2D perspective projection and thus the loss of depth information, current image-based methods cannot effectively estimate the needle tip's trajectory towards both retinal and floating targets. To address this limitation, we propose to use the shadow positions of the target and the instrument tip to estimate their relative depth position and accordingly optimize the instrument tip's insertion trajectory until the tip approaches targets within iOCT's scanning area. Our method succeeds target approaching on a retina model, and achieves an average depth error of 0.0127 mm and 0.3473 mm for floating and retinal targets respectively in the surgical simulator without damaging the retina.