Speed Improvement in Image Stitching for Panoramic Dynamic Images during Minimally Invasive Surgery.

Dinh Thai Kim,Ching-Hwa Cheng,Kai Che Jack Liu,Van Thang Nguyen,Kai Che Jack Huang,Don-Gey Liu

doi:10.1155/2018/3654210

Dinh Thai Kim, Ching-Hwa Cheng + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/3654210

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Abstract

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) minimizes the surgical incisions that need to be made and hence reduces the physical trauma involved during the surgical process. The ultimate goal is to reduce postoperative pain and blood loss as well as to limit the scarring area and hence accelerate recovery. It is therefore of great interest to both the surgeon and the patient. However, a major problem with MIS is that the field of vision of the surgeon is very narrow. We had previously developed and tested an MIS panoramic endoscope (MISPE) that provides the surgeon with a broader field of view. However, one issue with the MISPE was its low rate of video stitching. Therefore, in this paper, we propose using the region of interest in combination with the downsizing technique to improve the image-stitching performance of the MISPE. Experimental results confirm that, by using the proposed method, the image size can be increased by more than 160%, with the image resolution also improving. For instance, we could achieve performance improvements of 10× (CPU) and 23× (GPU) as compared to that of the original method.

Highlights

In minimally invasive surgery (MIS), the surgeon uses a variety of techniques to operate while ensuring that the patient is subjected to as few incisions as possible
Results and Discussion e OpenCV and OpenCL programming languages are both used in the proposed technique. e program was executed using an Intel i3 computation rate of 10.75 times (CPU) and a GTX750Ti Nvidia GPU with 8 GB RAM. e GPU plays a major role in the optimization of processing in PCs. e stitching performance can be accelerated by performing CPU and GPU operations simultaneously. e two endoscopic cameras used were of the same type (2.0 MP USB digital Microscope)
Improvement in Video-Stitching Speed. e effectiveness of the proposed method was compared with that of the conventional one. e results of the comparison are described . e stitching video was produced using the two endoscopic cameras at medium resolution (640 × 480). e program used for the performance comparisons was executed on both a CPU and a GPU

Summary

Introduction

In minimally invasive surgery (MIS), the surgeon uses a variety of techniques to operate while ensuring that the patient is subjected to as few incisions as possible. E narrow view of the endoscopic camera prevents the surgeon from being able to image the entire surgical field with clarity. Image-mosaicing methods can be classified into two categories: the direct method and the features-based method [1]. E features-based method, on the other hand, does not require an initialization process, and algorithms that can match distinctive image features, such as the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) [2], speeded-up robust features (SURF) [3], and oriented FAST and rotated BRIEF (ORB) [4], are used for estimating the alignment parameters. A comprehensive review of the literature on this method has been published by Szeliski [1]

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