3D reconstruction of internal organ surfaces for minimal invasive surgery.

While Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) offers great benefits to patients compared with open surgery surgeons suffer from a restricted field-of-view and obstruction from instruments. We present a novel method for 3D reconstruction of soft tissue, which can provide a wider field-of-view with 3D information for surgeons, including restoration of missing data. The paper focuses on the use of Structure from Motion (SFM) techniques to solve the missing data problem and application of competitive evolutionary agents to improve the robustness to missing data and outliers. The method has been evaluated with synthetic data, images from a phantom heart model, and in vivo MIS image sequences using the da Vinci telerobotic surgical system.