ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,551,289, issued on Feb. 17, was assigned to MAKO Surgical Corp. (Weston, Fla.).
"Tracker-based surgical navigation" was invented by Jose Luis Moctezuma de la Barrera (Freiburg, Germany) and Harald Hoppe (Achern, Germany).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Systems and methods for tracking an object in a workspace. A tracker is disposed relative to the object and includes a predefined geometry of markers having first and second marker arrangements, each including three markers in a collinear relationship. A camera with a view of the tracker generates an image comprising blobs, where a subset of the blobs is directly generated from the markers o...