Simultaneous Surgical Visibility Assessment, Restoration, and Augmented Stereo Surface Reconstruction for Robotic Prostatectomy

Endoscopic vision plays a significant role in minimally invasive surgical procedures. The maintenance and augmentation of such direct in-situ vision is paramount not only for safety by preventing inadvertent injury, but also to improve precision and reduce operating time. This work aims to quantitatively and objectively evaluate endoscopic visualization on surgical videos without employing any reference images, and simultaneously to restore such degenerated visualization and improve the performance of surgical 3-D reconstruction. An objective no-reference color image quality measure is defined in terms of sharpness, naturalness, and contrast. A retinex-driven fusion framework was proposed not only to recover the deteriorated visibility but also to augment the surface reconstruction. The approaches of surgical visibility assessment, restoration, and reconstruction were validated on clinical data. The experimental results demonstrate that the average visibility was significantly enhanced from 0.66 to 1.27. Moreover, the average density ratio of surgical 3-D reconstruction was improved from 94.8% to 99.6%.