BU Research Blog

We would like to invite you to the latest research seminar of the Centre for Games and Music Technology Research.

Speaker: Long Chen

Title:     Augmented Reality Technology for Minimally Invasive Surgery

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM

Date: Wednesday 1^st February 2017

Room: PG11, Poole House, Talbot Campus

Abstract:  This research presentation will demonstrate a novel approach of using augmented reality technology to provide rich additional information in for Minimally Invasive Surgery. The research addresses a number of challenges in terms of dealing with monocular visual sensor, and 3D surface reconstruction via state of the art computer vision algorithm. In recent years, laparoscopic scene tracking and surface reconstruction has been a focus of investigation to provide rich additional information to aid the surgical process. In this project, we developed an AR framework to compensate the depth perception issue of monocular laparoscopic scenes. Monocular laparoscopic techniques are arguably the most common techniques used in minimally invasive surgical paradigm. Yet, it is one of the technically demanding procedures from surgeons, and in which information is provided primarily through the video outputted from endoscopes. The major challenge in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) such as laparoscopy is the lack of depth perception. We developed a robust 3D surface reconstruction and augmented reality with depth perception on the reconstructed scene by using the state-of-the-art visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm for the sparse salient point clouds detection. We then develop a robust global 3D surface reconstruction framework to obtain smooth surfaces from the unstructured sparse point cloud. The evaluation results illustrating the potential of our algorithm for depth augmentation and depth-correct augmented reality in Minimally Invasive Surgery.

We hope to see you there.