The Cognitive Vision in Robotic Surgery Lab is developing computer vision and AI techniques for intraoperative navigation and real-time tissue characterisation.

Head of Group

Dr Stamatia (Matina) Giannarou

411 Bessemer Building
South Kensington Campus

+44 (0) 20 7594 8904

What we do

Surgery is undergoing rapid changes driven by recent technological advances and our on-going pursuit towards early intervention and personalised treatment. We are developing computer vision and Artificial Intelligence techniques for intraoperative navigation and real-time tissue characterisation during minimally invasive and robot-assisted operations to improve both the efficacy and safety of surgical procedures. Our work will revolutionize the treatment of cancers and pave the way for autonomous robot-assisted interventions.

Why it is important?

With recent advances in medical imaging, sensing, and robotics, surgical oncology is entering a new era of early intervention, personalised treatment, and faster patient recovery. The main goal is to completely remove cancerous tissue while minimising damage to surrounding areas. However, achieving this can be challenging, often leading to imprecise surgeries, high re-excision rates, and reduced quality of life due to unintended injuries. Therefore, technologies that enhance cancer detection and enable more precise surgeries may improve patient outcomes.

How can it benefit patients?

Our methods aim to ensure patients receive accurate and timely surgical treatment while reducing surgeons' mental workload, overcoming limitations, and minimizing errors. By improving tumor excision, our hybrid diagnostic and therapeutic tools will lower recurrence rates and enhance survival outcomes. More complete tumor removal will also reduce the need for repeat procedures, improving patient quality of life, life expectancy, and benefiting society and the economy.

Meet the team

Citation

BibTex format

@inproceedings{Zhan:2020:10.1109/icra40945.2020.9197294,
author = {Zhan, J and Cartucho, J and Giannarou, S},
doi = {10.1109/icra40945.2020.9197294},
pages = {11147--11154},
publisher = {IEEE},
title = {Autonomous tissue scanning under free-form motion for intraoperative tissue characterisation},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/icra40945.2020.9197294},
year = {2020}
}

RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - CPAPER
AB - In Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), tissue scanning with imaging probes is required for subsurface visualisation to characterise the state of the tissue. However, scanning of large tissue surfaces in the presence of motion is a challenging task for the surgeon. Recently, robot-assisted local tissue scanning has been investigated for motion stabilisation of imaging probes to facilitate the capturing of good quality images and reduce the surgeon's cognitive load. Nonetheless, these approaches require the tissue surface to be static or translating with periodic motion. To eliminate these assumptions, we propose a visual servoing framework for autonomous tissue scanning, able to deal with free-form tissue motion. The 3D structure of the surgical scene is recovered, and a feature-based method is proposed to estimate the motion of the tissue in real-time. The desired scanning trajectory is manually defined on a reference frame and continuously updated using projective geometry to follow the tissue motion and control the movement of the robotic arm. The advantage of the proposed method is that it does not require the learning of the tissue motion prior to scanning and can deal with free-form motion. We deployed this framework on the da Vinci ® surgical robot using the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) for Ultrasound tissue scanning. Our framework can be easily extended to other probe-based imaging modalities.
AU - Zhan,J
AU - Cartucho,J
AU - Giannarou,S
DO - 10.1109/icra40945.2020.9197294
EP - 11154
PB - IEEE
PY - 2020///
SP - 11147
TI - Autonomous tissue scanning under free-form motion for intraoperative tissue characterisation
UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/icra40945.2020.9197294
UR - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197294
UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/85280
ER -

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The Hamlyn Centre
Bessemer Building
South Kensington Campus
Imperial College
London, SW7 2AZ
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