ConvLSTM based Estimation Method of Incision Trajectory with Electric Knife by Connecting Restored Thermal Sources

Surgical navigation for understanding the internal structure of an organ is being actively studied, and it is necessary to estimate the incision trajectory to update the structure information dynamically. In this study, we focused on the fact that the region incised by the electric knife becomes high in temperature. Thus, we propose an estimation method of incision trajectory by restoring thermal source from diffused thermal images using a ConvLSTM and connecting the restored thermal sources. We first verified the possibility of thermal source restoration, and confirmed that the method enabled to restore the thermal source with high PSNR equivalent to 42.61. Next, we verified the accuracy of the incision trajectory from proposed method by comparing with the traditional method. The results suggested a better performance compared with the traditional method.