Kidney edge detection in laparoscopic image data for computer-assisted surgery : Kidney edge detection.

Purpose: In robotic-assisted kidney surgery, computational methods make it possible to augment the surgical scene and potentially improve patient outcome. Most often, soft-tissue registration is a prerequisite for the visualization of tumors and vascular structures hidden beneath the surface. State-of-the-art volume-to-surface registration methods, however, are computationally demanding and require a sufficiently large target surface.