Disturbance-Free Surgical Video Generation from Multi-Camera Shadowless Lamps for Open Surgery
This addresses the challenge of capturing clear surgical videos for education and research, though it is incremental as it builds on prior multi-camera setups by automating alignment.
The paper tackles the problem of generating unobstructed surgical videos by automating the alignment of multiple cameras on a shadowless lamp, resulting in videos that surgeons rated as superior for ease of confirming the surgical area and viewing comfort, with improvements in video quality over existing methods.
Video recordings of open surgeries are greatly required for education and research purposes. However, capturing unobstructed videos is challenging since surgeons frequently block the camera field of view. To avoid occlusion, the positions and angles of the camera must be frequently adjusted, which is highly labor-intensive. Prior work has addressed this issue by installing multiple cameras on a shadowless lamp and arranging them to fully surround the surgical area. This setup increases the chances of some cameras capturing an unobstructed view. However, manual image alignment is needed in post-processing since camera configurations change every time surgeons move the lamp for optimal lighting. This paper aims to fully automate this alignment task. The proposed method identifies frames in which the lighting system moves, realigns them, and selects the camera with the least occlusion to generate a video that consistently presents the surgical field from a fixed perspective. A user study involving surgeons demonstrated that videos generated by our method were superior to those produced by conventional methods in terms of the ease of confirming the surgical area and the comfort during video viewing. Additionally, our approach showed improvements in video quality over existing techniques. Furthermore, we implemented several synthesis options for the proposed view-synthesis method and conducted a user study to assess surgeons' preferences for each option.