A Novel Endoscope System for Position Detection and Depth Estimation of the Ureter

Iatrogenic injury of ureter occurs occasionally in the clinical laparoscopic surgery. The ureter injury may cause the serious complications and kidney damage. To avoid such an injury, it is necessary to detect the ureter position in real-time. Currently, the endoscope cannot perform this type of function in detecting the ureter position in real-time. In order to have the real-time display of ureter position during the surgical operation, we propose a novel endoscope system which consists of a modified endoscope light and a new lumiontron tube with the LED light. The endoscope light is modified to detect the position of ureter by using our proposed dim target detection algorithm (DTDA). To make this new system functioning, two algorithmic approaches are proposed for the display of ureter position. The horizontal position of ureter is detected by the center line extraction method and the depth of ureter is estimated by the depth estimation method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed endoscope system can extract the position and depth information of ureter and exhibit superior performance in terms of accuracy and stabilization.