  Robotic-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RMIS) can benefit from the
automation of common, repetitive or well-defined but ergonomically difficult
tasks. One such task is the scanning of a pick-up endomicroscopy probe over a
complex, undulating tissue surface in order to enhance the effective
field-of-view through video mosaicing. In this paper, the da Vinci surgical
robot, through the dVRK framework, is used for autonomous scanning and 2D
mosaicing over a user-defined region of interest. To achieve the level of
precision required for high quality large-area mosaic generation, which relies
on sufficient overlap between consecutive image frames, visual servoing is
performed using a tracking marker attached to the probe. The resulting
sub-millimetre accuracy of the probe motion allows for the generation of large
endomicroscopy mo- saics with minimal intervention from the surgeon. It also
allows the probe to be maintained in an orientation perpendicular to the local
tissue surface, providing optimal imaging results. Images are streamed from the
endomicroscope and overlaid live onto the surgeons view, while 2D mosaics are
generated in real-time, and fused into a 3D stereo reconstruction of the
surgical scene, thus providing intuitive visualisation and fusion of the
multi-scale images. The system therefore offers significant potential to
enhance surgical procedures, by providing the operator with cellular-scale
information over a larger area than could typically be achieved by manual
scanning.
