An Augmented Reality Endoscope System for Ureter Position Detection

Iatrogenic injury of ureter in the clinical operation may cause the serious complication and kidney damage. To avoid such a medical accident, it is necessary to provide the ureter position information to the doctor. For the detection of ureter position, an ureter position detection and display system with the augmented ris proposed to detect the ureter that is covered by human tissue. There are two key issues which should be considered in this new system. One is how to detect the covered ureter that cannot be captured by the electronic endoscope and the other is how to display the ureter position that provides stable and high-quality images. Simultaneously, any delayed processing of the system should disturb the surgery. The aided hardware detection method and target detection algorithms are proposed in this system. To mark the ureter position, a surface-lighting plastic optical fiber (POF) with the encoded light-emitting diode (LED) light is used to indicate the ureter position. The monochrome channel filtering algorithm (MCFA) is proposed to locate the ureter region more precisely. The ureter position is extracted using the proposed automatic region growing algorithm (ARGA) that utilizes the statistical information of the monochrome channel for the selection of growing seed point. In addition, according to the pulse signal of encoded light, the recognition of bright and dark frames based on the aided hardware (BDAH) is proposed to expedite the processing speed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed endoscope system can identify 92.04% ureter region in average.