Suture thread spline reconstruction from endoscopic images for robotic surgery with reliability-driven keypoint detection

Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023

Neelay Joglekar, Fei Liu, Ryan Orosco, Michael Yip

Publisher Link: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10161539/

Abstract: Automating the process of manipulating and delivering sutures during robotic surgery is a prominent problem at the frontier of surgical robotics, as automating this task can significantly reduce surgeons’ fatigue during tele-operated surgery and allow them to spend more time addressing higher-level clinical decision making. Accomplishing autonomous suturing and suture manipulation in the real world requires accurate suture thread localization and reconstruction, the process of creating a 3D shape representation of suture thread from 2D stereo camera surgical image pairs. This is a very challenging problem due to how limited pixel information is available for the threads, as well as their sensitivity to lighting and specular reflection. We present a suture thread reconstruction work that uses reliable keypoints and a Minimum Variation Spline (MVS) smoothing optimization to construct a 3D centerline from a segmented …

Joglekar et al. (2023) Suture thread spline reconstruction from endoscopic images for robotic surgery with reliability-driven keypoint detection, Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 4747-4753.