Multicamera 3D Reconstruction of Dynamic Surgical Cavities: Camera Grouping and Pair Sequencing

Dynamic 3D reconstruction of surgical cavities is essential in a wide range of computer-assisted surgical intervention applications, including but not limited to surgical guidance, pre-operative image registration and vision-based force estimation. According to a survey on vision based 3D reconstruction for abdominal minimally invasive surgery (MIS) [1], real-time 3D reconstruction and tissue deformation recovery remain open challenges to researchers. The main challenges include specular reflections from the wet tissue surface and the highly dynamic nature of abdominal surgical scenes. This work aims to overcome these obstacles by using multiple viewpoint and independently moving RGB cameras to generate an accurate measurement of tissue deformation at the volume of interest (VOI), and proposes a novel efficient camera pairing algorithm. Experimental results validate the proposed camera grouping and pair sequencing, and were evaluated with the Raven-II [2] surgical robot system for tool navigation, the Medtronic Stealth Station s7 surgical navigation system for real-time camera pose monitoring, and the Space Spider white light scanner to derive the ground truth 3D model.