Whole Stomach 3D reconstruction and frame localization from monocular endoscope video

Abstract

Gastric endoscopy is a common clinical practice that enables medical doctors to diagnose various lesions inside a stomach. In order to identify the location of a gastric lesion such as early cancer and a peptic ulcer within the stomach, this work addresses to reconstruct the color-textured 3D model of a whole stomach from a standard monocular endoscope video and localize any selected video frame to the 3D model. We examine how to enable structure-from-motion (SfM) to reconstruct the whole shape of a stomach from endoscope images, which is a challenging task due to the texture-less nature of the stomach surface. We specifically investigate the combined effect of chromo-endoscopy and color channel selection on SfM to increase the number of feature points. We also design a plane fitting-based algorithm for 3D point outliers removal to improve the 3D model quality. We show that whole stomach 3D reconstruction can be achieved (more than 90% of the frames can be reconstructed) by using red channel images captured under chromo-endoscopy by spreading indigo carmine (IC) dye on the stomach surface. In experimental results, we demonstrate the reconstructed 3D models for seven subjects and the application of lesion localization and reconstruction. The methodology and results presented in this paper could offer some valuable reference to other researchers and also could be an excellent tool for gastric surgeons in various computer-aided diagnosis applications.