Neri Alberto, Fehrentz Maximilan, Penza Veronica, Mattos Leonardo S, Haouchine Nazim
Biomedical Robotics Lab, Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy.
Department of Computer Science, Bioengineering, Robotics and Systems Engineering (DIBRIS), University of Genoa, Genova, Italy.
Int J Comput Assist Radiol Surg. 2025 Jun 19. doi: 10.1007/s11548-025-03447-5.
Neural radiance fields (NeRF) offer exceptional capabilities for 3D reconstruction and view synthesis, yet their reliance on extensive multi-view data limits their application in surgical intraoperative settings where only limited data are available. This work addresses this challenge by leveraging a single intraoperative image and preoperative data to train NeRF efficiently for surgical scenarios.
We leverage preoperative MRI data to define the set of camera viewpoints and images needed for robust and unobstructed training. Intraoperatively, the appearance of the surgical image is transferred to the pre-constructed training set through neural style transfer, specifically combining WTC and STROTSS to prevent over-stylization. This process enables the creation of a dataset for instant and fast single-image NeRF training.
The method is evaluated with four clinical neurosurgical cases. Quantitative comparisons to NeRF models trained on real surgical microscope images demonstrate strong synthesis agreement, with similarity metrics indicating high reconstruction fidelity and stylistic alignment. When compared with ground truth, our method demonstrates high structural similarity, confirming good reconstruction quality and texture preservation.
Our approach demonstrates the feasibility of single-image NeRF training in surgical settings, overcoming the limitations of traditional multi-view methods. By eliminating the dependency on a large multi-view dataset, our method offers a faster, more adaptable solution for generating accurate 3D reconstructions in real-time surgical scenarios.
