PhD defense: Visual Monocular SLAM for Minimally Invasive Surgery and its Application to Augmented Reality

PhD defense: Nader Mahmoud ALI

Team: AVR

Title: Visual Monocular SLAM for Minimally Invasive Surgery and its Application to Augmented Reality

Abstract: Recovering dense 3D information from intra-operative endoscopic images together with the relative endoscope camera pose are fundamental blocks for accurate guidance and navigation in image-guided surgery. They have several important applications, e.g., they enable augmented reality overlay of pre-operative models, which are readily available from different imaging modalities. This thesis provides a systematic approach for estimating these two pieces of information based on a pure visual Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) issued from robotics. We decouple the dense reconstruction from the camera trajectory estimation, resulting in a system that combines the accuracy and robustness of feature-based SLAM with the more complete reconstruction of direct SLAM methods. The proposed solutions in this thesis have been validated on real porcine in-vivo and ex-vivo sequences from different datasets and have proved to be fast and do not need any external tracking hardware nor significant intervention from medical staff. The sole input is video frames of a standard monocular endoscope. They therefore can be integrated easily into the current clinical workflow.

The committee is composed of Prof. Guillaume Morel (Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University, Paris, France), Assoc. Prof. Danail Stoyanov (University College London, England), Marie-Odile Berger  (Research Fellow, Head of MAGRIT INRIA Nancy Grand Est (Loria), France), Prof. Luc Soler (Scientific director at IRCAD, Strasbourg, France), Prof. Christophe Doignon (ICube, University of Strasbourg, France, Supervisor), Prof. Jose Maria Martinez Montiel (University of Zaragoza, Spain, Supervisor).

The defense will be held in English and will take place on Tuesday June 19th, 2018, at 9:30 am in the amphitheater (A207) at Pole API, Campus Illkirch, Télécom Physique Strasbourg.