Bladder cancer has a high recurrence rate that necessitates lifelong surveillance to detect mucosal lesions. Examination with white light cystoscopy (WLC), the standard of care, is inherently subjective and data storage limited to clinical notes, diagrams, and still images. A visual history of the bladder wall can enhance clinical and surgical management. To address this clinical need, we developed a tool to transform in vivo WLC videos into virtual 3-dimensional (3D) bladder models using advanced computer vision techniques.
WLC videos from rigid cystoscopies (1280 x 720 pixels) were recorded at 30 Hz followed by immediate camera calibration to control for image distortions. Video data were fed into an automated structure-from-motion algorithm that generated a 3D point cloud followed by a 3D mesh to approximate the bladder surface. The highest quality cystoscopic images were projected onto the approximated bladder surface to generate a virtual 3D bladder reconstruction. In intraoperative WLC videos from 36 patients undergoing transurethral resection of suspected bladder tumors, optimal reconstruction was achieved from frames depicting well-focused vasculature, when the bladder was maintained at constant volume with minimal debris, and when regions of the bladder wall were imaged multiple times. A significant innovation of this work is the ability to perform the reconstruction using video from a clinical procedure collected with standard equipment, thereby facilitating rapid clinical translation, application to other forms of endoscopy and new opportunities for longitudinal studies of cancer recurrence.
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