A bronchoscopic navigation method based on neural radiation fields.

Purpose: We introduce a novel approach for bronchoscopic navigation that leverages neural radiance fields (NeRF) to passively locate the endoscope solely from bronchoscopic images. This approach aims to overcome the limitations and challenges of current bronchoscopic navigation tools that rely on external infrastructures or require active adjustment of the bronchoscope.

Methods: To address the challenges, we leverage NeRF for bronchoscopic navigation, enabling passive endoscope localization from bronchoscopic images. We develop a two-stage pipeline: offline training using preoperative data and online passive pose estimation during surgery. To enhance performance, we employ Anderson acceleration and incorporate semantic appearance transfer to deal with the sim-to-real gap between training and inference stages.

Results: We assessed the viability of our approach by conducting tests on virtual bronchscopic images and a physical phantom against the SLAM-based methods. The average rotation error in our virtual dataset is about 3.18 $_{}^{\circ }$ and the translation error is around 4.95 mm. On the physical phantom test, the average rotation and translation error are approximately 5.14 $_{}^{\circ }$ and 13.12 mm.

Conclusion: Our NeRF-based bronchoscopic navigation method eliminates reliance on external infrastructures and active adjustments, offering promising advancements in bronchoscopic navigation. Experimental validation on simulation and real-world phantom models demonstrates its efficacy in addressing challenges like low texture and challenging lighting conditions.