Free-hand 3D reconstruction and tumor segmentation of Laparoscopic Ultrasounds for pancreatic MIS interventions

Abstract

Pancreatic cancer's treatment dilemma comes while trying to determine the precise nature of the lesion. The best approach is defined by diagnose of the tumor cells' staging. This paper presents a fast approach towards acquiring an estimation of the tumor positioning and size through laparoscopic ultrasound (LUS) images. The method segments 2D images of pancreas and lesions before reconstructing the extracted tumors into a full 3D volume. The whole method is integrated into a visualization and analysis specialized software (3D Slicer) as a module to provide users with a better experience. Reconstruction positioning is aided by a tracking system for the LUS probe which generates the images. In order to validate the method, an experiment using ex vivo porcine pancreas was conducted. We demonstrate the feasibility of the tracked LUS navigation approach for the delimitation of tumor structures allocated in the pancreas. Results show time constrains, while accuracy suffers in some stretches according to the image quality. Distinguishable structures are successfully depicted on the reconstruction. Time constrains for image segmentation are considerably reduced to nearly a second per image when the method is integrated into 3D Slicer as a module over a common laptop computer. Full reconstruction is achieved in 33 seconds. This proves the usefulness of the application in addition to being able to display both 2D segmentation and 3D reconstruction methods results