The safety of endoscopic skull base surgery can be enhanced by accurate navigation in preoperative computed tomography (CT) or, more recently, intraoperative cone-beam CT (CBCT). The ability to register real-time endoscopic video with CBCT offers an additional advantage by rendering information directly within the visual scene to account for intraoperative anatomical change. However, tracker localization error ( ∼ 1-2 mm ) limits the accuracy with which video and tomographic images can be registered. This paper reports the first implementation of image-based video-CBCT registration, conducts a detailed quantitation of the dependence of registration accuracy on system parameters, and demonstrates improvement in registration accuracy achieved by the image-based approach. Performance was evaluated as a function of parameters intrinsic to the image-based approach, including system geometry, CBCT image quality, and computational runtime. Overall system performance was evaluated in a cadaver study simulating transsphenoidal skull base tumor excision. Results demonstrated significant improvement in registration accuracy with a mean reprojection distance error of 1.28 mm for the image-based approach versus 1.82 mm for the conventional tracker-based method. Image-based registration was highly robust against CBCT image quality factors of noise and resolution, permitting integration with low-dose intraoperative CBCT.

Surgeries of the skull base require accuracy to safely navigate the critical anatomy. This is particularly the case for endoscopic endonasal skull base surgery (ESBS) where the surgeons work within millimeters of neurovascular structures at the skull base. Today's navigation systems provide approximately 2 mm accuracy. Accuracy is limited by the indirect relationship of the navigation system, the image and the patient. We propose a method to directly track the position of the endoscope using video data acquired from the endoscope camera. Our method first tracks image feature points in the video and reconstructs the image feature points to produce 3D points, and then registers the reconstructed point cloud to a surface segmented from preoperative computed tomography (CT) data. After the initial registration, the system tracks image features and maintains the 2D-3D correspondence of image features and 3D locations. These data are then used to update the current camera pose. We present a method for validation of our system, which achieves submillimeter (0.70 mm mean) target registration error (TRE) results.

In this paper, we present a new Adaptive-Scale Kernel Consensus (ASKC) robust estimator as a generalization of the popular and state-of-the-art robust estimators such as RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC), Adaptive Scale Sample Consensus (ASSC), and Maximum Kernel Density Estimator (MKDE). The ASKC framework is grounded on and unifies these robust estimators using nonparametric kernel density estimation theory. In particular, we show that each of these methods is a special case of ASKC using a specific kernel. Like these methods, ASKC can tolerate more than 50 percent outliers, but it can also automatically estimate the scale of inliers. We apply ASKC to two important areas in computer vision, robust motion estimation and pose estimation, and show comparative results on both synthetic and real data.

Using endoscopic video, it is possible to perform 3D reconstruction of the anatomy using the well known epipolar constraint between matched feature points. Through this constraint, it is possible to recover the translation and rotation between camera positions and thus reconstruct the 3D anatomy by triangulation. However, these motion estimates are not stable for small camera motions. In this work, we propose a covariance estimation scheme to select pairs of frames which give rise to stable motion estimates, i.e. minimal variance with respect to pixel match error. We parameterize the essential matrix using a minimal 5 parameter representation and estimate motion covariance based upon the estimated feature match variance. The proposed algorithm is applied to endoscopic video sequences recorded in porcine sinus passages in order to extract stable motion estimates.

To correctly estimate the camera motion parameters and reconstruct the structure of the surrounding tissues from endoscopic image sequences, we need not only to deal with outliers (e.g., mismatches), which may involve more than 50% of the data, but also to accurately distinguish inliers (correct matches) from outliers. In this paper, we propose a new robust estimator, Adaptive Scale Kernel Consensus (ASKC), which can tolerate more than 50 percent outliers while automatically estimating the scale of inliers. With ASKC, we develop a reliable feature tracking algorithm. This, in turn, allows us to develop a complete system for estimating endoscopic camera motion and reconstructing anatomical structures from endoscopic image sequences. Preliminary experiments on endoscopic sinus imagery have achieved promising results.