Hybrid Functional Maps for Crease-Aware Non-Isometric Shape Matching

Non-isometric shape correspondence remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Traditional methods using Laplace-Beltrami operator (LBO) eigenmodes face limitations in characterizing high-frequency extrinsic shape changes like bending and creases. We propose a novel approach of combining the non-orthogonal extrinsic basis of eigenfunctions of the elastic thin-shell hessian with the intrinsic ones of the LBO, creating a hybrid spectral space in which we construct functional maps. To this end, we present a theoretical framework to effectively integrate non-orthogonal basis functions into descriptor- and learning-based functional map methods. Our approach can be incorporated easily into existing functional map pipelines across varying applications and is able to handle complex deformations beyond isometries. We show extensive evaluations across various supervised and unsupervised settings and demonstrate significant improvements. Notably, our approach achieves up to 15% better mean geodesic error for non-isometric correspondence settings and up to 45% improvement in scenarios with topological noise.

On the Localization of Ultrasound Image Slices within Point Distribution Models

Thyroid disorders are most commonly diagnosed using high-resolution Ultrasound (US). Longitudinal nodule tracking is a pivotal diagnostic protocol for monitoring changes in pathological thyroid morphology. This task, however, imposes a substantial cognitive load on clinicians due to the inherent challenge of maintaining a mental 3D reconstruction of the organ. We thus present a framework for automated US image slice localization within a 3D shape representation to ease how such sonographic diagnoses are carried out. Our proposed method learns a common latent embedding space between US image patches and the 3D surface of an individual's thyroid shape, or a statistical aggregation in the form of a statistical shape model (SSM), via contrastive metric learning. Using cross-modality registration and Procrustes analysis, we leverage features from our model to register US slices to a 3D mesh representation of the thyroid shape. We demonstrate that our multi-modal registration framework can localize images on the 3D surface topology of a patient-specific organ and the mean shape of an SSM. Experimental results indicate slice positions can be predicted within an average of 1.2 mm of the ground-truth slice location on the patient-specific 3D anatomy and 4.6 mm on the SSM, exemplifying its usefulness for slice localization during sonographic acquisitions. Code is publically available: \href{https://github.com/vuenc/slice-to-shape}{https://github.com/vuenc/slice-to-shape}

DisguisOR: Holistic Face Anonymization for the Operating Room

Purpose: Recent advances in Surgical Data Science (SDS) have contributed to an increase in video recordings from hospital environments. While methods such as surgical workflow recognition show potential in increasing the quality of patient care, the quantity of video data has surpassed the scale at which images can be manually anonymized. Existing automated 2D anonymization methods under-perform in Operating Rooms (OR), due to occlusions and obstructions. We propose to anonymize multi-view OR recordings using 3D data from multiple camera streams. Methods: RGB and depth images from multiple cameras are fused into a 3D point cloud representation of the scene. We then detect each individual's face in 3D by regressing a parametric human mesh model onto detected 3D human keypoints and aligning the face mesh with the fused 3D point cloud. The mesh model is rendered into every acquired camera view, replacing each individual's face. Results: Our method shows promise in locating faces at a higher rate than existing approaches. DisguisOR produces geometrically consistent anonymizations for each camera view, enabling more realistic anonymization that is less detrimental to downstream tasks. Conclusion: Frequent obstructions and crowding in operating rooms leaves significant room for improvement for off-the-shelf anonymization methods. DisguisOR addresses privacy on a scene level and has the potential to facilitate further research in SDS.

S3M: Scalable Statistical Shape Modeling through Unsupervised Correspondences

Statistical shape models (SSMs) are an established way to geometrically represent the anatomy of a population with various clinically relevant applications. However, they typically require domain expertise and labor-intensive manual segmentations or landmark annotations to generate. Methods to estimate correspondences for SSMs typically learn with such labels as supervision signals. We address these shortcomings by proposing an unsupervised method that leverages deep geometric features and functional correspondences to learn local and global shape structures across complex anatomies simultaneously. Our pipeline significantly improves unsupervised correspondence estimation for SSMs compared to baseline methods, even on highly irregular surface topologies. We demonstrate this for two different anatomical structures: the thyroid and a multi-chamber heart dataset. Furthermore, our method is robust enough to learn from noisy neural network predictions, enabling scaling SSMs to larger patient populations without manual annotation.

Know your sensORs -- A Modality Study For Surgical Action Classification

The surgical operating room (OR) presents many opportunities for automation and optimization. Videos from various sources in the OR are becoming increasingly available. The medical community seeks to leverage this wealth of data to develop automated methods to advance interventional care, lower costs, and improve overall patient outcomes. Existing datasets from OR room cameras are thus far limited in size or modalities acquired, leaving it unclear which sensor modalities are best suited for tasks such as recognizing surgical action from videos. This study demonstrates that surgical action recognition performance can vary depending on the image modalities used. We perform a methodical analysis on several commonly available sensor modalities, presenting two fusion approaches that improve classification performance. The analyses are carried out on a set of multi-view RGB-D video recordings of 18 laparoscopic procedures.