Congratulations to Yuehao Wang (supervised by Prof. Qi Dou) won the MICCAI Society Young Scientist Award for the paper entitled “Neural Rendering for Stereo 3D Reconstruction of Deformable Tissues in Robotic Surgery” at the 25th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2022).
This work focuses on the reconstruction of the soft tissues in surgical scenes, which plays a very important role in many clinical applications such as intraoperative navigation and image-guided robotic surgery automation. Specifically, this paper presents a novel NeRF-based framework to represent deformable surgical scenes and optimize deformations and shapes of soft-tissues from endoscopic stereo robotic surgery videos under the single-viewpoint setting. The well-tailored rendering and training strategies in the proposed method can jointly address tool occlusion and single-viewpoint challenges in endoscopic surgery scenarios. This novel approach has shown superior performance both in capturing complex deformations and reconstructing shapes and textures in various scenarios. This paper brings about a significant breakthrough in surgical scene reconstruction and is believed to widely inspire pathways for robotic surgery scene understanding and other down-stream clinical-oriented tasks.
The MICCAI is a worldwide largest and most influential academic conference in the field of medical image computing and computer-assisted intervention, which sits in the interdisciplinary areas of medical imaging, artificial intelligence, computer vision, surgical robotics and extended reality techniques for healthcare applications. The MICCAI Young Scientist Awards recognize the papers with highest quality that are first-authored by young scientists at the main conference. MICCAI 2022 accepted 574 out of 1865 submissions and selected the 5 best papers to receive the awards by considering the quality of scientific contribution and conference presentation.
