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In International journal of computer assisted radiology and surgery

PURPOSE : Laparoscopic liver resection is a minimal invasive surgery. Augmented reality can map preoperative anatomy information extracted from computed tomography to the intraoperative liver surface reconstructed from stereo 3D laparoscopy. However, liver surface registration is particularly challenging as the intraoperative surface is only partially visible and suffers from large liver deformations due to pneumoperitoneum. This study proposes a deep learning-based robust point cloud registration network.

METHODS : This study proposed a low overlap liver surface registration algorithm combining local mixed features and global features of point clouds. A learned overlap mask is used to filter the non-overlapping region of the point cloud, and a network is used to predict the overlapping region threshold to regulate the training process.

RESULTS : We validated the algorithm on the DePoLL (the Deformable Porcine Laparoscopic Liver) dataset. Compared with the baseline method and other state-of-the-art registration methods, our method achieves minimum target registration error (TRE) of 19.9 ± 2.7 mm.

CONCLUSION : The proposed point cloud registration method uses the learned overlapping mask to filter the non-overlapping areas in the point cloud, then the extracted overlapping area point cloud is registered according to the mixed features and global features, and this method is robust and efficient in low-overlap liver surface registration.

Guan Peidong, Luo Huoling, Guo Jianxi, Zhang Yanfang, Jia Fucang

2023-Feb-14

Augmented reality, Deep learning, Laparoscopic liver resection, Point cloud registration