Self-Supervised Cyclic Diffeomorphic Mapping for Soft Tissue Deformation Recovery in Robotic Surgery Scenes

The ability to recover tissue deformation from visual features is fundamental for many robotic surgery applications. This has been a long-standing research topic in computer vision, however, is still unsolved due to complex dynamics of soft tissues when being manipulated by surgical instruments. The ambiguous pixel correspondence caused by homogeneous texture makes achieving dense and accurate tissue tracking even more challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised framework to recover tissue deformations from stereo surgical videos. Our approach integrates semantics, cross-frame motion flow, and long-range temporal dependencies to enable the recovered deformations to represent actual tissue dynamics. Moreover, we incorporate diffeomorphic mapping to regularize the warping field to be physically realistic. To comprehensively evaluate our method, we collected stereo surgical video clips containing three types of tissue manipulation (i.e., pushing, dissection and retraction) from two different types of surgeries (i.e., hemicolectomy and mesorectal excision). Our method has achieved impressive results in capturing deformation in 3D mesh, and generalized well across manipulations and surgeries. It also outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on non-rigid registration and optical flow estimation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on self-supervised learning for dense tissue deformation modeling from stereo surgical videos. Our code will be released.