Endoscope navigation with SLAM-based registration to computed tomography for transoral surgery

Minimally invasive transoral surgery (TROS) aims to reduce the trauma and complications, where transoral examination with an endoscope is a vital step. Close to the critical head-neck-brain anatomical structures, the transoral procedures can be much complicated and pose significant challenges to accurate navigation requirements. Therefore, it is laborious for navigating endoscopic instruments due to the sophisticated anatomy. In this paper, we propose to use visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) for endoscope navigation in an oral cavity. We create an intra-operative 3D point cloud registered to pre-operative computed tomography (CT) with the aid of semi-dense contour to enhance visualization. Moreover, we have validated our method in the phantom experiment. The corresponding navigation and registration accuracy are presented to validate the proposed approach.