Identifying key mechanisms leading to visual recognition errors for missed colorectal polyps using eye-tracking technology.

Background And Aim: Lack of visual recognition of colorectal polyps may lead to interval cancers. The mechanisms contributing to perceptual variation, particularly for subtle and advanced colorectal neoplasia, have scarcely been investigated. We aimed to evaluate visual recognition errors and provide novel mechanistic insights.

Artificial intelligence and automation in endoscopy and surgery.

Modern endoscopy relies on digital technology, from high-resolution imaging sensors and displays to electronics connecting configurable illumination and actuation systems for robotic articulation. In addition to enabling more effective diagnostic and therapeutic interventions, the digitization of the procedural toolset enables video data capture of the internal human anatomy at unprecedented levels. Interventional video data encapsulate functional and structural information about a patient's anatomy as well as events, activity and action logs about the surgical process.

Computer Vision in the Surgical Operating Room.

Background: Multiple types of surgical cameras are used in modern surgical practice and provide a rich visual signal that is used by surgeons to visualize the clinical site and make clinical decisions. This signal can also be used by artificial intelligence (AI) methods to provide support in identifying instruments, structures, or activities both in real-time during procedures and postoperatively for analytics and understanding of surgical processes.

Summary: In this paper, we provide a succinct perspective on the use of AI and especially computer vision to power solutions for the surgical operating room (OR).

Refractive Two-View Reconstruction for Underwater 3D Vision.

Recovering 3D geometry from cameras in underwater applications involves the Refractive Structure-from-Motion problem where the non-linear distortion of light induced by a change of medium density invalidates the single viewpoint assumption. The pinhole-plus-distortion camera projection model suffers from a systematic geometric bias since refractive distortion depends on object distance. This leads to inaccurate camera pose and 3D shape estimation.

Adjoint Transformation Algorithm for Hand-Eye Calibration with Applications in Robotic Assisted Surgery.

Hand-eye calibration aims at determining the unknown rigid transformation between the coordinate systems of a robot arm and a camera. Existing hand-eye algorithms using closed-form solutions followed by iterative non-linear refinement provide accurate calibration results within a broad range of robotic applications. However, in the context of surgical robotics hand-eye calibration is still a challenging problem due to the required accuracy within the millimetre range, coupled with a large displacement between endoscopic cameras and the robot end-effector.

A Continuum Robot and Control Interface for Surgical Assist in Fetoscopic Interventions.

Twin-twin transfusion syndrome requires interventional treatment using a fetoscopically introduced laser to sever the shared blood supply between the fetuses. This is a delicate procedure relying on small instrumentation with limited articulation to guide the laser tip and a narrow field of view to visualize all relevant vascular connections. In this letter, we report on a mechatronic design for a comanipulated instrument that combines concentric tube actuation to a larger manipulator constrained by a remote centre of motion.

Medical-grade Sterilizable Target for Fluid-immersed Fetoscope Optical Distortion Calibration.

We have developed a calibration target for use with fluid-immersed endoscopes within the context of the GIFT-Surg (Guided Instrumentation for Fetal Therapy and Surgery) project. One of the aims of this project is to engineer novel, real-time image processing methods for intra-operative use in the treatment of congenital birth defects, such as spina bifida and the twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. The developed target allows for the sterility-preserving optical distortion calibration of endoscopes within a few minutes.

Shape-from-Template.

We study a problem that we call Shape-from-Template, which is the problem of reconstructing the shape of a deformable surface from a single image and a 3D template. Current methods in the literature address the case of isometric deformations, and relax the isometry constraint to the convex inextensibility constraint, solved using the so-called maximum depth heuristic. We call these methods zeroth-order since they use image point locations (the zeroth-order differential structure) to solve the shape inference problem from a perspective image.

Enhanced imaging colonoscopy facilitates dense motion-based 3D reconstruction.

We propose a novel approach for estimating a dense 3D model of neoplasia in colonoscopy using enhanced imaging endoscopy modalities. Estimating a dense 3D model of neoplasia is important to make 3D measurements and to classify the superficial lesions in standard frameworks such as the Paris classification. However, it is challenging to obtain decent dense 3D models using computer vision techniques such as Structure-from-Motion due to the lack of texture in conventional (white light) colonoscopy.