Stereoscopic laparoscopy using depth information from 3D model

Laparoscopic surgery is indispensable from the current surgical procedures. Conventional laparoscope (endoscope) systems produce 2D colored video images which do not provide surgeons an actual depth perception of the scene. In this work, the problem was formulated as synthesizing a stereo image of the monocular (conventional) laparoscope image by incorporating into them the depth information from a 3D CT model. The current method was applied to the laparoscope video at the rate of up to 5 frames per second to visualize its stereo video. Correlation coefficients between the depth maps calculated with our method with those from the shape from shading algorithm were within the range of 0.70 to 0.95 (P < 0.05).