The effectiveness and clinical benefits of image guided surgery are
well established for procedures where there is manageable tissue motion. In
minimally invasive cardiac, gastrointestinal, or abdominal surgery, large scale
tissue deformation prohibits accurate registration and fusion of pre- and intraoperative
data. Vision based techniques such as structure from motion and
simultaneous localization and mapping are capable of recovering 3D structure
and laparoscope motion. Current research in the area generally assumes the
environment is static, which is difficult to satisfy in most surgical procedures.
In this paper, a novel framework for simultaneous online estimation of
laparoscopic camera motion and tissue deformation in a dynamic environment
is proposed. The method only relies on images captured by the laparoscope to
sequentially and incrementally generate a dynamic 3D map of tissue motion
that can be co-registered with pre-operative data. The theoretical contribution ...