Enhanced differential evolution to combine optical mouse sensor with image structural patches for robust endoscopic navigation.

Endoscopic navigation generally integrates different modalities of sensory information in order to continuously locate an endoscope relative to suspicious tissues in the body during interventions. Current electromagnetic tracking techniques for endoscopic navigation have limited accuracy due to tissue deformation and magnetic field distortion. To avoid these limitations and improve the endoscopic localization accuracy, this paper proposes a new endoscopic navigation framework that uses an optical mouse sensor to measure the endoscope movements along its viewing direction. We then enhance the differential evolution algorithm by modifying its mutation operation. Based on the enhanced differential evolution method, these movement measurements and image structural patches in endoscopic videos are fused to accurately determine the endoscope position. An evaluation on a dynamic phantom demonstrated that our method provides a more accurate navigation framework. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, it improved the navigation accuracy from 2.4 to 1.6 mm and reduced the processing time from 2.8 to 0.9 seconds.