3D surface reconstruction for laparoscopic computer-assisted interventions: comparison of state-of-the-art methods

Abstract

One of the main challenges related to computer-assisted laparoscopic surgery is the accurate registration of pre-operative planning images with patient's anatomy. One popular approach for achieving this involves intraoperative 3D reconstruction of the target organ's surface with methods based on multiple view geometry. The latter, however, require robust and fast algorithms for establishing correspondences between multiple images of the same scene. Recently, the first endoscope based on Time-of-Flight (ToF) camera technique was introduced. It generates dense range images with high update rates by continuously measuring the run-time of intensity modulated light. While this approach yielded promising results in initial experiments, the endoscopic ToF camera has not yet been evaluated in the context of related work. The aim of this paper was therefore to compare its performance with different state-of-the-art surface reconstruction methods on identical objects. For this purpose, surface data from a set of porcine organs as well as organ phantoms was acquired with four different cameras: a novel Time-of-Flight (ToF) endoscope, a standard ToF camera, a stereoscope, and a High Definition Television (HDTV) endoscope. The resulting reconstructed partial organ surfaces were then compared to corresponding ground truth shapes extracted from computed tomography (CT) data using a set of local and global distance metrics. The evaluation suggests that the ToF technique has high potential as means for intraoperative endoscopic surface registration.