Thesis: Ultrasound Laparoscopic Guidance for Minimally Invasive Surgery, Biopsy, and Ablation Procedures

PhD defense: Chinmay SAMANT

Title: Ultrasound Laparoscopic Guidance for Minimally Invasive Surgery, Biopsy, and Ablation Procedures

Team: AVR

Abstract: Minimally invasive image-guided laparoscopic surgery allows shorter hospital stays for the patient reducing post-operative trauma and faster healing time. With the recent advances in imaging techniques, surgeons can efficiently and confidently plan a surgery by using different image modalities such as CT/MRI scans, ultrasound images etc. Real-time image fusion techniques can overlay the images from different modalities together to provide a comprehensive view to the surgeon. An important aspect of real-time fusion is that the laparoscopic instrument is tracked in real-time using sensors. In this thesis, we present a detailed analysis of such tracking technologies while providing a novel sensor setup for ultrasound laparoscope image tracking. We present a kinematic chain for the sensor setup and provide a solution for noise reduction in the sensor data using rotation averaging technique. Hand-Eye calibration is also a fundamental part of hybrid tracking systems. We present a detailed review of this technique. We also present a deterministic, robust and accurate method for solving Hand-Eye calibration problem even for large amounts of outliers and high levels of measurement noise. The proposed method is based on a reformulation of a rank-constrained semi-definite programming problem allowing for robustness to be enforced via an iteratively re-weighted optimization approach.

The jury is composed of:

• Prof. Dr. Michel de Mathelin, University of Strasbourg (Thesis Director)
• Dr. Adlane Habed, University of Strasbourg (Thesis Supervisor)
• Prof. Dr. David Fofi, University of Bourgogne-Franche Comté
• Prof. Dr. Pascal Vasseur,  University of  Rouen Normandie
• Dr. Alexandre Hostettler, R&D Director, IRCAD, Strasbourg
• Dr John Klepper, Director, Siemens-Healthcare, USA

Keywords: Hand-Eye Calibration, Robotics, Hybrid-Tracking, Laparoscopes.

The defense will be held in English on Monday, 16th December at 9:00 am in the Conference room (Main Floor) of IHU (1 Place de l'Hôpital, 67000 Strasbourg).