Towards Multi-Camera Systems for Minimally Invasive Surgery

Nowadays many surgical operations for diagnosis and treatment of diseases are performed using minimally invasive techniques. This trend has increased the demand of ergonomic medical devices to help surgeons to safely execute medical practices by enhancing their experience, thus improving surgery outcome. In this context, one of the most important challenges of minimally invasive surgery is the narrow field of view: surgeons can only see the instruments tip movement on a two-dimensional screen, and cannot monitor the adjacent anatomical areas in three-dimensions as in traditional open surgery. Hence, perforation of healthy tissues or undesired brushing may occur. To cope with these problems we propose a novel surgical instrument, which embeds multiple fish-eye cameras, accompanied by an image processing algorithm to visualize the adjacent area from different angles. This will allow surgeons to have a broader view around the instrument itself, hence preventing injuries caused by contact between the instrument body and the surrounding anatomical areas. The proposed system is versatile: it can be used for different surgical operations, and it can also be adapted for other applications dealing with narrow spaces exploration requiring a broad view.