Online camera-pose-free stereo endoscopic tissue deformation recovery with tissue-invariant vision-biomechanics consistency

Tissue deformation recovery based on stereo endoscopic images is crucial for tool-tissue interaction analysis and benefits surgical navigation and autonomous soft tissue manipulation. Previous research suffers from the problems raised from camera motion, occlusion, large tissue deformation, lack of tissue-specific biomechanical priors, and reliance on offline processing. Unlike previous studies where the tissue geometry and deformation are represented by 3D points and displacements, the proposed method models tissue geometry as the 3D point and derivative map and tissue deformation as the 3D displacement and local deformation map. For a single surface point, 6 parameters are used to describe its rigid motion and 3 parameters for its local deformation. The method is formulated under the camera-centric setting, where all motions are regarded as the scene motion with respect to the camera. Inter-frame alignment is realized by optimizing the inter-frame deformation, making it unnecessary to estimate camera pose. The concept of the canonical map is introduced to optimize tissue geometry and deformation in an online approach. Quantitative and qualitative experiments were conducted using in vivo and ex vivo laparoscopic datasets. With the inputs of depth and optical flow, the method stably models tissue geometry and deformation even when the tissue is partially occluded or moving outside the field of view. Results show that the 3D reconstruction accuracy in the non-occluded and occluded areas reaches 0.37±0.27 mm and 0.39±0.21 mm in terms of surface distance, respectively. The method can also estimate surface strain distribution during various manipulations as an extra modality for mechanical-based analysis.