Real-time mosaicing of fetoscopic videos using SIFT

Fetoscopic laser photo-coagulation of the placental vascular anastomoses remains the most effective therapy for twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS) in monochorionic twin pregnancies. However, to ensure the success of the intervention, complete photo-coagulation of all anastomoses is needed. This is made difficult by the limited field of view of the fetoscopic video guidance, which hinders the surgeon's ability to locate all the anastomoses. A potential solution to this problem is to expand the field of view of the placental surface by creating a mosaic from overlapping fetoscopic images. This mosaic can then be used for anastomoses localization and spatial orientation during surgery. However, this requires accurate and fast algorithms that can operate within the real-time constraints of fetal surgery. In this work, we present an image mosaicing framework that leverages the parallelism of modern GPUs and can process clinical fetoscopic images in real-time. Initial qualitative results on ex-vivo placental images indicate that the proposed framework can generate clinically useful mosaics from fetoscopic videos in real-time.