The body does not hold still. With every breath, the kidney moves up to 4 cm and deforms slightly, and this is exactly what makes it difficult for a navigation system to reliably determine the position of an endoscope inside it. How can such a system be extended so that it takes these movements into account? Laura Oliva-Maza from the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics spent several months working on this question at the University of Technology Sydney.

The stay in Australia falls into the final phase of her doctorate. She was supervised there by Professor Teresa Vidal-Calleja, Director of Research at the UTS Robotics Institute, whose focus lies on robotic perception and SLAM. In terms of content, the work follows on directly from the research that Laura Oliva-Maza pursues at the MIRO Innovation Lab at DLR: a navigation system for flexible ureteroscopy that uses computer vision and SLAM to simultaneously determine the position of the endoscope tip and build a three-dimensional map of the kidney.

The focus of the collaboration with UTS was to extend the navigation system to work on dynamic environments with small deformations. Earlier work has already addressed the separate treatment of moving objects such as instruments and kidney stones. The movement of the organ itself, however, was left out. This is exactly where the work at UTS comes in: the SLAM system is intended to detect the breathing-related movement and deformation of the kidney and include it in its estimation, in order to track the camera position precisely under these conditions as well. In practice, this would mean navigation that remains stable throughout the entire procedure.

Beyond the technical work, the stay also offered insight into a different research environment. Laura Oliva-Maza worked together with researchers from a wide range of disciplines and describes the exchange with Teresa Vidal-Calleja and the UTS team as the most valuable part of her time in Australia. Added to this was life in a new country, which made the stay a formative experience for her well beyond the research itself.