Automatic Detection of the Uterus and Fallopian Tube Junctions in Laparoscopic Images

We present a method for the automatic detection of the uterus and the Fallopian tube/Uterus junctions (FU-junctions) in a monocular laparoscopic image. The main application is to perform automatic registration and fusion between preoperative radiological images of the uterus and laparoscopic images for image-guided surgery. In the broader context of computer assisted intervention, our method is the first that detects an organ and registration landmarks from laparoscopic images without manual input. Our detection problem is challenging because of the large inter-patient anatomical variability and pathologies such as uterine fibroids. We solve the problem using learned contextual geometric constraints that statistically model the positions and orientations of the FU-junctions relative to the uterus' body. We train the uterus detector using a modern part-based approach and the FU-junction detector using junction-specific context-sensitive features. We have trained and tested on a database of 95 uterus images with cross validation, and successfully detected the uterus with Recall = 0.95 and average Number of False Positives per Image (NFPI) = 0.21, and FU-junctions with Recall = 0.80 and NFPI = 0.50. Our experimental results show that the contextual constraints are fundamental to achieve high quality detection.