PhD defense : Automatic localization of endoscope in intraoperative CT image: a simple approach to augmented reality guidance in laparoscopic surgery

PhD defense : Sylvain BERNHARDT

Team : AVR

Title : Automatic localization of endoscope in intraoperative CT image: a simple approach to augmented reality guidance in laparoscopic surgery

Abstract : Over the past decades, minimally invasive surgery has progressively become more popular than open surgery thanks to greater clinical benefits. However, this kind of intervention introduced a loss of direct vision upon the scene for the surgeon. Introducing augmented reality to minimally invasive surgery appears to be a viable solution to alleviate this drawback and has thus been an attractive topic for the research community. Yet, correctly augmenting a laparoscopic scene remains challenging, due to the non-rigidity of abdominal tissues and organs. Therefore, the literature does not report a satisfactory approach to laparoscopic augmented reality, as such methods lack accuracy or require expensive and impractical additional equipment.
In light of this, we present a novel paradigm to augmented reality in abdominal minimally invasive surgery. Based only on standard hybrid operating room equipment, our approach can provide the static relationship between the endoscope and an intraoperative 3D scan. Extensive experiments on a radio-opaque pattern quantitatively show that the accuracy of our augmentations is less than one millimeter. Tests on in vivo data further demonstrates the clinical potential of our approach in several realistic surgical cases.

This thesis was supervised by Christophe Doignon (professor at the University of Strasbourg) and codiriged by Luc Soler (research director at IRCAD of Strasbourg).

The presentation will take place on Thursday, February 25th starting 1pm in the Lindbergh lecture hall at IRCAD. This thesis will be supported in english.