Using Contours as Boundary Conditions for Elastic Registration during Minimally Invasive Hepatic Surgery

International audienceWe address in this paper the ill-posed problem of initial alignment of pre-operative to intra-operative data for augmented reality during minimally invasive hepatic surgery. This problem consists of finding the rigid transformation that relates the scanning reference and the endoscopic camera pose, and the non-rigid transformation undergone by the liver w.r.t its scanned state. Most of the state-of-the-art methods assume a known initial registration. Here, we propose a method that permits to recover the deformation undergone by the liver while simultaneously finding the rotational and translational parts of the transformation. Our formulation considers the boundaries of the liver with its surrounding tissues as hard constraints directly encoded in an energy minimization process. We performed experiments on real in-vivo data of human hepatic surgery and synthetic data, and compared our method with related works