Reconstruction of stereoendoscopic video has been explored for guiding minimally-invasive procedures across many surgical subspecialties, and may play an increasingly important role in navigation as stereo-equipped robotic systems become more widely available. Capturing stereo video for the purpose of offline reconstruction requires dedicated hardware, a mechanism for temporal synchronization, and video processing tools that perform accurate clip extraction, frame extraction, and lossless compression for archival. This work describes a minimal hardware setup comprising entirely off-the-shelf components for capturing video from the da Vinci and similar 3D-enabled surgical systems. Software utilities are also provided for synchronizing data collection and accurately handling captured video files. End-to-end testing demonstrates that all processing functions (clipping, frame cropping, compression, un-compression, and frame extraction) operate losslessly, and can be combined to generate reconstruction-ready stereo pairs from raw surgical video.
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