HyKey: hyperspectral keypoint detection and matching in minimally invasive surgery

PURPOSE: 3D reconstruction in minimally invasive surgery (MIS) enables enhanced surgical guidance through improved visualisation, tool tracking, and augmented reality. However, traditional RGB-based keypoint detection and matching pipelines struggle with surgical challenges, such as poor texture and complex illumination. We investigate whether using snapshot hyperspectral imaging (HSI) can provide improved results on keypoint detection and matching surgical scenes. METHODS: We developed HyKey, a hyperspectral keypoint detection and description model made up of a hybrid 3D-2D convolutional neural network that jointly extracts spatial-spectral features from HSI. The model was trained using synthetic homographic augmentation and epipolar geometry constraints on a robotically acquired dual-camera RGB-HSI laparoscopic dataset of ex vivo organs with calibrated camera poses. We benchmarked performance against established RGB-based methods, including SuperPoint and ALIKE. RESULTS: on pose estimation, demonstrating consistent improvements across multiple evaluation metrics. CONCLUSION: Integrating spectral information from an HSI cube offers a promising approach for robust monocular 3D reconstruction in MIS, addressing limitations of texture-poor surgical environments through enhanced spectral-spatial feature discrimination. Our model and dataset are available at https://github.com/alexsaikia/HyKey-Hyperspectral-Keypoint-Detection.