Computer Vision News - June 2020

3 Summary WEISS at UCL (part 2) 25 Francisco Vasconcelos is a lecturer in robotics and computation at UCL. He is also part of the Surgical Robot Vision Research Group within the Wellcome / EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS), working alongside Principal Investigator Dan Stoyanov and co- investigators Agostino Stilli and Neil Clancy. He speaks to us about his work. Francisco says the WEISS Centre is a great environment in which to work. Engineers are based on the first and second floors, while the third floor is the surgery division. His team interact regularly with clinicians and work with medical PhD students. They have common seminars where engineers present technical work and clinicians ask probing questions and raise new ideas. “At WEISS, we have a broad theme around surgical robotics with a big focus on vision,” Francisco tells us. “We all have our own interests and I’m focusing on bringing both classic and modern problems from computer vision to the surgical context. All the new deep learning algorithms for segmentation and so on, but also classic computer vision, like structure from motion and SLA M. These are important for generating training data for modern algorithms.” The team have been working with the da Vinci robot , which is a great test platform for the new algorithms coming out of computer vision. It provides a source of high-quality images coupled with robot kinematics , and challenging images that are often more difficult to segment or track because of the number of occlusions. One area of work for the team is fetoscopy , which is an endoscopic procedure to allow work on the fetus during pregnancy. “In that case, we are interested in doing mosaicking and image stitching because one of the areas of interest is the placenta,” Francisco explains. “That has a very complex vasculature with a very specific structure. It’s an opportunity to create a map of the whole vessel structure and guide surgery from there.” This research is being done in the context of a project called GIFT- Surg, in collaboration with King's