Context-Aware Real-Time Semantic View Expansion of Intraoperative 4D OCT

Four-dimensional microscope-integrated optical coherence tomography enables volumetric imaging of tissue structures and tool-tissue interactions in ophthalmic surgery at interactive update rates. This enables surgeons to undertake particular surgical steps under four-dimensional optical coherence tomography (4D OCT) guidance. However, current 4D OCT systems are limited by their field of view and signal quality. Both are attributable to the emphasis on high volume acquisition rates, which is critical for smooth visual perception by the surgeon. Existing 3D volume mosaicing methods are developed in the context of diagnostic imaging and do not take dynamic surgical interactions and real-time processing into account. In this paper, we propose a novel volume mosaicing and visualization methodology that not only aims at leveraging the temporal information to overcome some of the current limitations and imaging artifacts of 4D OCT, but also is aware of the surgical context and dynamic instrument motion implicitly during registration and explicitly for visualization. We propose a rapid 4-degrees of freedom volume registration, integrating an innovative approach for volume mosaicing that takes temporal recency and semantic information into account for enhanced surgical visualization. Our experiments on 4D OCT datasets demonstrate high registration accuracy and illustrate the benefits for visualization by reducing imaging artifacts and dynamically expanding the surgical view.