Surface reconstruction of abdominal organs using laparoscopic structured light for augmented reality

Creation of accurate surface models of abdominal organs is essential for many developing technologies in medicine and surgery. One application we are working towards is augmented reality (AR) visualization for laparoscopic surgery. Our current system meets some, but not all, of the requirements. We use two custom built laparoscopes, a custom built miniature projector, a standard camera, and a standard video capture and processing card to implement a laparoscopic structured light range acquisition system. We will briefly show the custom hardware but will emphasize the structured light depth extraction techniques used for the unique properties of surfaces inside the body, particularly dealing with specular reflections. In early experiments, we studied the effectiveness of our algorithm in highly specular environments by creating range images acquired from fresh animal organs. These experiments used a large projector, open abdomens, and offline image processing. We report the results of experiments using our miniature projector, and on line processing.