1,671 research outputs found
2D Reconstruction of Small Intestine's Interior Wall
Examining and interpreting of a large number of wireless endoscopic images
from the gastrointestinal tract is a tiresome task for physicians. A practical
solution is to automatically construct a two dimensional representation of the
gastrointestinal tract for easy inspection. However, little has been done on
wireless endoscopic image stitching, let alone systematic investigation. The
proposed new wireless endoscopic image stitching method consists of two main
steps to improve the accuracy and efficiency of image registration. First, the
keypoints are extracted by Principle Component Analysis and Scale Invariant
Feature Transform (PCA-SIFT) algorithm and refined with Maximum Likelihood
Estimation SAmple Consensus (MLESAC) outlier removal to find the most reliable
keypoints. Second, the optimal transformation parameters obtained from first
step are fed to the Normalised Mutual Information (NMI) algorithm as an initial
solution. With modified Marquardt-Levenberg search strategy in a multiscale
framework, the NMI can find the optimal transformation parameters in the
shortest time. The proposed methodology has been tested on two different
datasets - one with real wireless endoscopic images and another with images
obtained from Micro-Ball (a new wireless cubic endoscopy system with six image
sensors). The results have demonstrated the accuracy and robustness of the
proposed methodology both visually and quantitatively.Comment: Journal draf
A deep learning framework for quality assessment and restoration in video endoscopy
Endoscopy is a routine imaging technique used for both diagnosis and
minimally invasive surgical treatment. Artifacts such as motion blur, bubbles,
specular reflections, floating objects and pixel saturation impede the visual
interpretation and the automated analysis of endoscopy videos. Given the
widespread use of endoscopy in different clinical applications, we contend that
the robust and reliable identification of such artifacts and the automated
restoration of corrupted video frames is a fundamental medical imaging problem.
Existing state-of-the-art methods only deal with the detection and restoration
of selected artifacts. However, typically endoscopy videos contain numerous
artifacts which motivates to establish a comprehensive solution.
We propose a fully automatic framework that can: 1) detect and classify six
different primary artifacts, 2) provide a quality score for each frame and 3)
restore mildly corrupted frames. To detect different artifacts our framework
exploits fast multi-scale, single stage convolutional neural network detector.
We introduce a quality metric to assess frame quality and predict image
restoration success. Generative adversarial networks with carefully chosen
regularization are finally used to restore corrupted frames.
Our detector yields the highest mean average precision (mAP at 5% threshold)
of 49.0 and the lowest computational time of 88 ms allowing for accurate
real-time processing. Our restoration models for blind deblurring, saturation
correction and inpainting demonstrate significant improvements over previous
methods. On a set of 10 test videos we show that our approach preserves an
average of 68.7% which is 25% more frames than that retained from the raw
videos.Comment: 14 page
Vision-based retargeting for endoscopic navigation
Endoscopy is a standard procedure for visualising the human gastrointestinal tract. With the advances in biophotonics, imaging techniques such as narrow band imaging, confocal laser endomicroscopy, and optical coherence tomography can be combined with normal endoscopy for assisting the early diagnosis of diseases, such as cancer. In the past decade, optical biopsy has emerged to be an effective tool for tissue analysis, allowing in vivo and in situ assessment of pathological sites with real-time feature-enhanced microscopic images. However, the non-invasive nature of optical biopsy leads to an intra-examination retargeting problem, which is associated with the difficulty of re-localising a biopsied site consistently throughout the whole examination. In addition to intra-examination retargeting, retargeting of a pathological site is even more challenging across examinations, due to tissue deformation and changing tissue morphologies and appearances. The purpose of this thesis is to address both the intra- and inter-examination retargeting problems associated with optical biopsy. We propose a novel vision-based framework for intra-examination retargeting. The proposed framework is based on combining visual tracking and detection with online learning of the appearance of the biopsied site. Furthermore, a novel cascaded detection approach based on random forests and structured support vector machines is developed to achieve efficient retargeting. To cater for reliable inter-examination retargeting, the solution provided in this thesis is achieved by solving an image retrieval problem, for which an online scene association approach is proposed to summarise an endoscopic video collected in the first examination into distinctive scenes. A hashing-based approach is then used to learn the intrinsic representations of these scenes, such that retargeting can be achieved in subsequent examinations by retrieving the relevant images using the learnt representations. For performance evaluation of the proposed frameworks, extensive phantom, ex vivo and in vivo experiments have been conducted, with results demonstrating the robustness and potential clinical values of the methods proposed.Open Acces
An online learning approach to in-vivo tracking using synergistic features
In this paper we present an online algorithm for robustly tracking surgical tools in dynamic environments that can assist a surgeon during in-vivo robotic surgery procedures. The next generation of in-vivo robotic surgical devices includes integrated imaging and effector platforms that need to be controlled through real-time visual feedback. Our tracking algorithm learns the appearance of the tool online to account for appearance and perspective changes. In addition, the tracker uses multiple features working together to model the object and discover new areas of the tool as it moves quickly, exits and re-enters the scene, or becomes occluded and requires recovery. The algorithm can persist through changes in lighting and pose by using a memory database, which is built online, using a series of features working together to exploit different aspects of the object being tracked. We present results using real in-vivo imaging data from a human partial nephrectomy
SemHint-MD: Learning from Noisy Semantic Labels for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation
Without ground truth supervision, self-supervised depth estimation can be
trapped in a local minimum due to the gradient-locality issue of the
photometric loss. In this paper, we present a framework to enhance depth by
leveraging semantic segmentation to guide the network to jump out of the local
minimum. Prior works have proposed to share encoders between these two tasks or
explicitly align them based on priors like the consistency between edges in the
depth and segmentation maps. Yet, these methods usually require ground truth or
high-quality pseudo labels, which may not be easily accessible in real-world
applications. In contrast, we investigate self-supervised depth estimation
along with a segmentation branch that is supervised with noisy labels provided
by models pre-trained with limited data. We extend parameter sharing from the
encoder to the decoder and study the influence of different numbers of shared
decoder parameters on model performance. Also, we propose to use cross-task
information to refine current depth and segmentation predictions to generate
pseudo-depth and semantic labels for training. The advantages of the proposed
method are demonstrated through extensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark
and a downstream task for endoscopic tissue deformation tracking
Learning-based depth and pose prediction for 3D scene reconstruction in endoscopy
Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer worldwide. Early detection and treatment of pre-cancerous tissue during colonoscopy is critical to improving prognosis. However, navigating within the colon and inspecting the endoluminal tissue comprehensively are challenging, and success in both varies based on the endoscopist's skill and experience. Computer-assisted interventions in colonoscopy show much promise in improving navigation and inspection. For instance, 3D reconstruction of the colon during colonoscopy could promote more thorough examinations and increase adenoma detection rates which are associated with improved survival rates. Given the stakes, this thesis seeks to advance the state of research from feature-based traditional methods closer to a data-driven 3D reconstruction pipeline for colonoscopy.
More specifically, this thesis explores different methods that improve subtasks of learning-based 3D reconstruction. The main tasks are depth prediction and camera pose estimation. As training data is unavailable, the author, together with her co-authors, proposes and publishes several synthetic datasets and promotes domain adaptation models to improve applicability to real data. We show, through extensive experiments, that our depth prediction methods produce more robust results than previous work. Our pose estimation network trained on our new synthetic data outperforms self-supervised methods on real sequences. Our box embeddings allow us to interpret the geometric relationship and scale difference between two images of the same surface without the need for feature matches that are often unobtainable in surgical scenes. Together, the methods introduced in this thesis help work towards a complete, data-driven 3D reconstruction pipeline for endoscopy
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