Designing a New Endoscope for Panoramic-View with Focus-Area 3D-Vision in Minimally Invasive Surgery

Abstract

Abstract Purpose The minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has shown advantages when compared to traditional surgery. However, there are two major challenges in the MIS technique: the limited field of view (FOV) and the lack of depth perception provided by the standard monocular endoscope. Therefore, in this study, we proposed a New Endoscope for Panoramic-View with Focus-Area 3D-Vision (3DMISPE) in order to provide surgeons with a broad view field and 3D images in the surgical area for real-time display. Method The proposed system consisted of two endoscopic cameras fixed to each other. Compared to our previous study, the proposed algorithm for the stitching videos was novel. This proposed stitching algorithm was based on the stereo vision synthesis theory. Thus, this new method can support 3D reconstruction and image stitching at the same time. Moreover, our approach employed the same functions on reconstructing 3D surface images by calculating the overlap region’s disparity and performing image stitching with the two-view images from both the cameras. Results The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method can combine two endoscope’s FOV into one wider FOV. In addition, the part in the overlap region could also be synthesized for a 3D display to provide more information about depth and distance, with an error of about 1 mm. In the proposed system, the performance could achieve a frame rate of up to 11.3 fps on a single Intel i5-4590 CPU computer and 17.6 fps on a computer with an additional GTX1060 Nvidia GeForce GPU. Furthermore, the proposed stitching method in this study could be made 1.4 times after when compared to that in our previous report. Besides, our method also improved stitched image quality by significantly reducing the alignment errors or “ghosting” when compared to the SURF-based stitching method employed in our previous study. Conclusion The proposed system can provide a more efficient way for the doctors with a broad area of view while still providing a 3D surface image in real-time applications. Our system give promises to improve existing limitations in laparoscopic surgery such as the limited FOV and the lack of depth perception.