ORBSLAM-based Endoscope Tracking and 3D Reconstruction

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel approach using ORBSLAM for real-time endoscope tracking and 3D reconstruction of soft organs during surgery, enhancing navigation without additional tracking devices.

Contribution

It introduces the application of ORBSLAM for endoscope tracking and extends it to semi-dense reconstruction of soft tissues, addressing textureless surface challenges.

Findings

Robust endoscope tracking in vivo despite organ deformation.

Semi-dense reconstruction of soft organs achieved.

High accuracy compared to CT ground truth.

Abstract

We aim to track the endoscope location inside the surgical scene and provide 3D reconstruction, in real-time, from the sole input of the image sequence captured by the monocular endoscope. This information offers new possibilities for developing surgical navigation and augmented reality applications. The main benefit of this approach is the lack of extra tracking elements which can disturb the surgeon performance in the clinical routine. It is our first contribution to exploit ORBSLAM, one of the best performing monocular SLAM algorithms, to estimate both of the endoscope location, and 3D structure of the surgical scene. However, the reconstructed 3D map poorly describe textureless soft organ surfaces such as liver. It is our second contribution to extend ORBSLAM to be able to reconstruct a semi-dense map of soft organs. Experimental results on in-vivo pigs, shows a robust endoscope tracking even with organs deformations and partial instrument occlusions. It also shows the reconstruction density, and accuracy against ground truth surface obtained from CT.