Enhanced vision system for laparoscopic surgery.

Laparoscopic surgery offers benefits to the patients but poses new challenges to the surgeons, including a limited field of view. In this paper, we present an innovative vision system that can be combined with a traditional laparoscope, and provides the surgeon with a global view of the abdominal cavity, bringing him or her closer to open surgery conditions. We present our first experiments performed on a testbench mimicking a laparoscopic setup: they demonstrate an important time gain in performing a complex task consisting bringing a thread into the field of view of the laparoscope.