Autonomous scanning for endomicroscopic mosaicing and 3D fusion

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery can benefit from the automation of common, repetitive or well-defined but ergonomically difficult tasks. One such task is the scanning of a pick-up endomicroscopy probe over a complex, undulating tissue surface to enhance the effective field-of-view through video mosaicing. In this paper, the da Vinci® surgical robot, through the dVRK framework, is used for autonomous scanning and 2D mosaicing over a user-defined region of interest. To achieve the level of precision required for high quality mosaic generation, which relies on sufficient overlap between consecutive image frames, visual servoing is performed using a combination of a tracking marker attached to the probe and the endomicroscopy images themselves. The resulting sub-millimetre accuracy of the probe motion allows for the generation of large mosaics with minimal intervention from the surgeon. Images are streamed from the endomicroscope and overlaid live onto the surgeons view, while 2D mosaics are generated in real-time, and fused into a 3D stereo reconstruction of the surgical scene, thus providing intuitive visualisation and fusion of the multi-scale images. The system therefore offers significant potential to enhance surgical procedures, by providing the operator with cellular-scale information over a larger area than could typically be achieved by manual scanning.