Live Tracking and Dense Reconstruction for Handheld Monocular Endoscopy.

Contemporary endoscopic simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods accurately compute endoscope poses; however, they only provide a sparse 3-D reconstruction that poorly describes the surgical scene. We propose a novel dense SLAM method whose qualities are: 1) monocular, requiring only RGB images of a handheld monocular endoscope; 2) fast, providing endoscope positional tracking and 3-D scene reconstruction, running in parallel threads; 3) dense, yielding an accurate dense reconstruction; 4) robust, to the severe illumination changes, poor texture and small deformations that are typical in endoscopy; and 5) self-contained, without needing any fiducials nor external tracking devices and, therefore, it can be smoothly integrated into the surgical workflow. It works as follows.

An adaptive and fully automatic method for estimating the 3D position of bendable instruments using endoscopic images.

Background: Flexible bendable instruments are key tools for performing surgical endoscopy. Being able to measure the 3D position of such instruments can be useful for various tasks, such as controlling automatically robotized instruments and analyzing motions.

Methods: An automatic method is proposed to infer the 3D pose of a single bending section instrument, using only the images provided by a monocular camera embedded at the tip of the endoscope.

On-patient see-through augmented reality based on visual SLAM.

Purpose: An augmented reality system to visualize a 3D preoperative anatomical model on intra-operative patient is proposed. The hardware requirement is commercial tablet-PC equipped with a camera. Thus, no external tracking device nor artificial landmarks on the patient are required.

Automatic localization of endoscope in intraoperative CT image: A simple approach to augmented reality guidance in laparoscopic surgery.

The use of augmented reality in minimally invasive surgery has been the subject of much research for more than a decade. The endoscopic view of the surgical scene is typically augmented with a 3D model extracted from a preoperative acquisition. However, the organs of interest often present major changes in shape and location because of the pneumoperitoneum and patient displacement.

A structured light-based laparoscope with real-time organs' surface reconstruction for minimally invasive surgery.

In this paper we present a new 3-D laparoscopic device based on structured light for minimally invasive surgery. Real-time reconstruction of internal organs' surfaces is very challenging as the numerous geometric and photometric variabilities and disturbances (bloody parts, specularities, smokes,..

A patient-mounted robotic platform for CT-scan guided procedures.

In this paper, we present a novel robotic assistant dedicated to medical interventions under computed tomography scan guidance. This compact and lightweight patient-mounted robot is designed so as to fulfill the requirements of most interventional radiology procedures. It is built from an original 5 DOF parallel structure with a semispherical workspace, particularly well suited to CT-scan interventional procedures.

The role of insertion points in the detection and positioning of instruments in laparoscopy for robotic tasks.

In robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery, an endoscopic camera is used to control the motion of surgical instruments. With this minimally invasive surgical (MIS) technique, every instrument has to pass through an insertion point in the abdominal wall and is mounted on the end-effector of a surgical robot which can be controlled by visual feedback. To achieve an accurate vision-based positioning of laparoscopic instruments, we introduce the motion constraint in MIS which is based on the location of out-of-field of view insertion points.