RGB-D Semantic SLAM for Surgical Robot Navigation in the Operating Room

Gaining spatial awareness of the Operating Room (OR) for surgical robotic systems is a key technology that can enable intelligent applications aiming at improved OR workflow. In this work, we present a method for semantic dense reconstruction of the OR scene using multiple RGB-D cameras attached and registered to the da Vinci Xi surgical system. We developed a novel SLAM approach for robot pose tracking in dynamic OR environments and dense reconstruction of the static OR table object. We validated our techniques in a mock OR by collecting data sequences with corresponding optical tracking trajectories as ground truth and manually annotated 100 frame segmentation masks. The mean absolute trajectory error is $11.4\pm1.9$ mm and the mean relative pose error is $1.53\pm0.48$ degrees per second. The segmentation DICE score is improved from 0.814 to 0.902 by using our SLAM system compared to single frame. Our approach effectively produces a dense OR table reconstruction in dynamic clinical environments as well as improved semantic segmentation on individual image frames.