Disturbance-Free Surgical Video Generation from Multi-Camera Shadowless Lamps for Open Surgery

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated method for generating clear, unobstructed surgical videos from multi-camera shadowless lamp setups, improving visualization and user experience in open surgery recordings.

Contribution

It introduces an automated alignment and camera selection technique that enhances surgical video clarity without manual post-processing.

Findings

Generated videos are easier for surgeons to interpret.

Surgeons preferred videos produced by the proposed method.

The approach outperforms existing techniques in video quality.

Abstract

Video recordings of open surgeries are greatly required for education and research purposes. However, capturing unobstructed videos is challenging since surgeons frequently block the camera field of view. To avoid occlusion, the positions and angles of the camera must be frequently adjusted, which is highly labor-intensive. Prior work has addressed this issue by installing multiple cameras on a shadowless lamp and arranging them to fully surround the surgical area. This setup increases the chances of some cameras capturing an unobstructed view. However, manual image alignment is needed in post-processing since camera configurations change every time surgeons move the lamp for optimal lighting. This paper aims to fully automate this alignment task. The proposed method identifies frames in which the lighting system moves, realigns them, and selects the camera with the least occlusion to generate a video that consistently presents the surgical field from a fixed perspective. A user study involving surgeons demonstrated that videos generated by our method were superior to those produced by conventional methods in terms of the ease of confirming the surgical area and the comfort during video viewing. Additionally, our approach showed improvements in video quality over existing techniques. Furthermore, we implemented several synthesis options for the proposed view-synthesis method and conducted a user study to assess surgeons' preferences for each option.