A new weakly supervised strategy for surgical tool detection

CLAD-Net: cross-layer aggregation attention network for real-time endoscopic instrument detection

As medical treatments continue to advance rapidly, minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has found extensive applications across various clinical procedures. Accurate identification of medical instruments plays a vital role in comprehending surgical situations and facilitating endoscopic image-guided surgical procedures. However, the endoscopic instrument detection poses a great challenge owing to the narrow operating space, with various interfering factors (e.g. smoke, blood, body fluids) and inevitable issues (e.g. mirror reflection, visual obstruction, illumination variation) in the surgery. To promote surgical efficiency and safety in MIS, this paper proposes a cross-layer aggregated attention detection network (CLAD-Net) for accurate and real-time detection of endoscopic instruments in complex surgical scenarios. We propose a cross-layer aggregation attention module to enhance the fusion of features and raise the effectiveness of lateral propagation of feature information. We propose a composite attention mechanism (CAM) to extract contextual information at different scales and model the importance of each channel in the feature map, mitigate the information loss due to feature fusion, and effectively solve the problem of inconsistent target size and low contrast in complex contexts. Moreover, the proposed feature refinement module (RM) enhances the network's ability to extract target edge and detail information by adaptively adjusting the feature weights to fuse different layers of features. The performance of CLAD-Net was evaluated using a public laparoscopic dataset Cholec80 and another set of neuroendoscopic dataset from Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center. From both datasets and comparisons, CLAD-Net achieves the A P 0.5 of 98.9% and 98.6%, respectively, that is better than advanced detection networks. A video for the real-time detection is presented in the following link: https://github.com/A0268/video-demo.

Surgical Tool Datasets for Machine Learning Research: A Survey

This paper is a comprehensive survey of datasets for surgical tool detection and related surgical data science and machine learning techniques and algorithms. The survey offers a high level perspective of current research in this area, analyses the taxonomy of approaches adopted by researchers using surgical tool datasets, and addresses key areas of research, such as the datasets used, evaluation metrics applied and deep learning techniques utilised. Our presentation and taxonomy provides a framework that facilitates greater understanding of current work, and highlights the challenges and opportunities for further innovative and useful research.