Automatic Registration of Anatomical Structures of Stereo-Endoscopic Point Clouds

Abstract

Abstract In image-guided surgery, imaging systems such as (stereo-)endoscopes allow intra-operative 3D reconstructions in form of point clouds. However, endoscopes provide only a narrow field of view, resulting in a confined point cloud. In this paper, we present an analysis and registration pipeline for confined point clouds acquired by stereo endoscopes into a fused representation. For a coarse registration, TEASER is applied, while a refinement is conducted utilizing point-to-plane ICP. The pipeline is tested on two datasets: acquired point clouds of a head phantom using a EinsteinVision® 3.0 endoscope and point clouds from the Stereo Correspondence And Reconstruction of Endoscopic Data challenge. The results for both datasets show that 3D reconstructions of anatomical structures by utilizing stereo-endoscopes and point cloud registration is a promising contactless and radiation-free method. However, non-rigid deformations are not yet incorporated and evaluation of the method compared to reference data is challenging.