Robust endoscopic pose estimation for intraoperative organ-mosaicking

The number of minimally invasive procedures is growing every year. These procedures are highly complex and very demanding for the surgeons. It is therefore important to provide intraoperative assistance to alleviate these difficulties. For most computer-assistance systems, like visualizing target structures with augmented reality, a registration step is required to map preoperative data (e.g. CT images) to the ongoing intraoperative scene. Without additional hardware, the (stereo-) endoscope is the prime intraoperative data source and with it, stereo reconstruction methods can be used to obtain 3D models from target structures. To link reconstructed parts from different frames (mosaicking), the endoscope movement has to be known. In this paper, we present a camera tracking method that uses dense depth and feature registration which are combined with a Kalman Filter scheme. It provides a robust position estimation that shows promising results in ex vivo and in silico experiments.