Automatic surface reconstruction for endoscopy-MR image fusion in image guided procedures

Endoscope based minimally invasive abdominal procedures provide potential advantages over conventional open surgery such as reduced trauma, shorter hospital stay, and quick recovery. One of the major limitations of the use of this technique is the small area that the endoscope covers resulting in the lack of proper 3D context of the surgical site. We propose a rapid and accurate approach to reconstruct the surface from intra-operative stereo endoscopic images of the surgical site which is projected with gridline light patterns. The reconstructed surface is then registered with the surface extracted from pre-operative MR images for fusion of endoscopic and MR images to guide these surgical procedures. We validate our proposed method on a liver phantom and achieve the surface registration error of 0.76±0.11 mm.