Automatic Registration of Anatomical Structures of Stereo-Endoscopic Point Clouds

In image-guided surgery, imaging systems such as (stereo-)endoscopes allow intra-operative 3D reconstructions in form of point clouds. However, endoscopes provide only a narrow field of view, resulting in a confined point cloud. In this paper, we present an analysis and registration pipeline for confined point clouds acquired by stereo endoscopes into a fused representation. For a coarse registration, TEASER is applied, while a refinement is conducted utilizing point-to-plane ICP. The pipeline is tested on two datasets: acquired point clouds of a head phantom using a EinsteinVision 3.0 endoscope and point clouds from the Stereo Correspondence And Reconstruction of Endoscopic Data challenge. The results for both datasets show that 3D reconstructions of anatomical structures by utilizing stereo-endoscopes and point cloud registration is a promising contactless and radiation-free method. However, non-rigid deformations are not yet incorporated and evaluation of the method compared to reference data is challenging.