Weakly Semi-supervised Tool Detection in Minimally Invasive Surgery Videos

Surgical tool detection is essential for analyzing and evaluating minimally invasive surgery videos. Current approaches are mostly based on supervised methods that require large, fully instance-level labels (i.e., bounding boxes). However, large image datasets with instance-level labels are often limited because of the burden of annotation. Thus, surgical tool detection is important when providing image-level labels instead of instance-level labels since image-level annotations are considerably more time-efficient than instance-level annotations. In this work, we propose to strike a balance between the extremely costly annotation burden and detection performance. We further propose a co-occurrence loss, which considers a characteristic that some tool pairs often co-occur together in an image to leverage image-level labels. Encapsulating the knowledge of co-occurrence using the co-occurrence loss helps to overcome the difficulty in classification that originates from the fact that some tools have similar shapes and textures. Extensive experiments conducted on the Endovis2018 dataset in various data settings show the effectiveness of our method.

Surgical tool classification and localization: results and methods from the MICCAI 2022 SurgToolLoc challenge

The ability to automatically detect and track surgical instruments in endoscopic videos can enable transformational interventions. Assessing surgical performance and efficiency, identifying skilled tool use and choreography, and planning operational and logistical aspects of OR resources are just a few of the applications that could benefit. Unfortunately, obtaining the annotations needed to train machine learning models to identify and localize surgical tools is a difficult task. Annotating bounding boxes frame-by-frame is tedious and time-consuming, yet large amounts of data with a wide variety of surgical tools and surgeries must be captured for robust training. Moreover, ongoing annotator training is needed to stay up to date with surgical instrument innovation. In robotic-assisted surgery, however, potentially informative data like timestamps of instrument installation and removal can be programmatically harvested. The ability to rely on tool installation data alone would significantly reduce the workload to train robust tool-tracking models. With this motivation in mind we invited the surgical data science community to participate in the challenge, SurgToolLoc 2022. The goal was to leverage tool presence data as weak labels for machine learning models trained to detect tools and localize them in video frames with bounding boxes. We present the results of this challenge along with many of the team's efforts. We conclude by discussing these results in the broader context of machine learning and surgical data science. The training data used for this challenge consisting of 24,695 video clips with tool presence labels is also being released publicly and can be accessed at https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/isi-surgtoolloc-2022.

Event-based Camera Tracker by $\nabla$t NeRF

When a camera travels across a 3D world, only a fraction of pixel value changes; an event-based camera observes the change as sparse events. How can we utilize sparse events for efficient recovery of the camera pose? We show that we can recover the camera pose by minimizing the error between sparse events and the temporal gradient of the scene represented as a neural radiance field (NeRF). To enable the computation of the temporal gradient of the scene, we augment NeRF's camera pose as a time function. When the input pose to the NeRF coincides with the actual pose, the output of the temporal gradient of NeRF equals the observed intensity changes on the event's points. Using this principle, we propose an event-based camera pose tracking framework called TeGRA which realizes the pose update by using the sparse event's observation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first camera pose estimation algorithm using the scene's implicit representation and the sparse intensity change from events.

Toward Unsupervised 3D Point Cloud Anomaly Detection using Variational Autoencoder

In this paper, we present an end-to-end unsupervised anomaly detection framework for 3D point clouds. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle the anomaly detection task on a general object represented by a 3D point cloud. We propose a deep variational autoencoder-based unsupervised anomaly detection network adapted to the 3D point cloud and an anomaly score specifically for 3D point clouds. To verify the effectiveness of the model, we conducted extensive experiments on the ShapeNet dataset. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluation, we demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the baseline method. Our code is available at https://github.com/llien30/point_cloud_anomaly_detection.

Deep Selection: A Fully Supervised Camera Selection Network for Surgery Recordings

Recording surgery in operating rooms is an essential task for education and evaluation of medical treatment. However, recording the desired targets, such as the surgery field, surgical tools, or doctor's hands, is difficult because the targets are heavily occluded during surgery. We use a recording system in which multiple cameras are embedded in the surgical lamp, and we assume that at least one camera is recording the target without occlusion at any given time. As the embedded cameras obtain multiple video sequences, we address the task of selecting the camera with the best view of the surgery. Unlike the conventional method, which selects the camera based on the area size of the surgery field, we propose a deep neural network that predicts the camera selection probability from multiple video sequences by learning the supervision of the expert annotation. We created a dataset in which six different types of plastic surgery are recorded, and we provided the annotation of camera switching. Our experiments show that our approach successfully switched between cameras and outperformed three baseline methods.

A Two-Block RNN-based Trajectory Prediction from Incomplete Trajectory

Trajectory prediction has gained great attention and significant progress has been made in recent years. However, most works rely on a key assumption that each video is successfully preprocessed by detection and tracking algorithms and the complete observed trajectory is always available. However, in complex real-world environments, we often encounter miss-detection of target agents (e.g., pedestrian, vehicles) caused by the bad image conditions, such as the occlusion by other agents. In this paper, we address the problem of trajectory prediction from incomplete observed trajectory due to miss-detection, where the observed trajectory includes several missing data points. We introduce a two-block RNN model that approximates the inference steps of the Bayesian filtering framework and seeks the optimal estimation of the hidden state when miss-detection occurs. The model uses two RNNs depending on the detection result. One RNN approximates the inference step of the Bayesian filter with the new measurement when the detection succeeds, while the other does the approximation when the detection fails. Our experiments show that the proposed model improves the prediction accuracy compared to the three baseline imputation methods on publicly available datasets: ETH and UCY ($9\%$ and $7\%$ improvement on the ADE and FDE metrics). We also show that our proposed method can achieve better prediction compared to the baselines when there is no miss-detection.

Neural Implicit Event Generator for Motion Tracking

We present a novel framework of motion tracking from event data using implicit expression. Our framework use pre-trained event generation MLP named implicit event generator (IEG) and does motion tracking by updating its state (position and velocity) based on the difference between the observed event and generated event from the current state estimate. The difference is computed implicitly by the IEG. Unlike the conventional explicit approach, which requires dense computation to evaluate the difference, our implicit approach realizes efficient state update directly from sparse event data. Our sparse algorithm is especially suitable for mobile robotics applications where computational resources and battery life are limited. To verify the effectiveness of our method on real-world data, we applied it to the AR marker tracking application. We have confirmed that our framework works well in real-world environments in the presence of noise and background clutter.

RGB-D Image Inpainting Using Generative Adversarial Network with a Late Fusion Approach

Diminished reality is a technology that aims to remove objects from video images and fills in the missing region with plausible pixels. Most conventional methods utilize the different cameras that capture the same scene from different viewpoints to allow regions to be removed and restored. In this paper, we propose an RGB-D image inpainting method using generative adversarial network, which does not require multiple cameras. Recently, an RGB image inpainting method has achieved outstanding results by employing a generative adversarial network. However, RGB inpainting methods aim to restore only the texture of the missing region and, therefore, does not recover geometric information (i.e, 3D structure of the scene). We expand conventional image inpainting method to RGB-D image inpainting to jointly restore the texture and geometry of missing regions from a pair of RGB and depth images. Inspired by other tasks that use RGB and depth images (e.g., semantic segmentation and object detection), we propose late fusion approach that exploits the advantage of RGB and depth information each other. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Deep Learning in Diabetic Foot Ulcers Detection: A Comprehensive Evaluation

There has been a substantial amount of research on computer methods and technology for the detection and recognition of diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs), but there is a lack of systematic comparisons of state-of-the-art deep learning object detection frameworks applied to this problem. With recent development and data sharing performed as part of the DFU Challenge (DFUC2020) such a comparison becomes possible: DFUC2020 provided participants with a comprehensive dataset consisting of 2,000 images for training each method and 2,000 images for testing them. The following deep learning-based algorithms are compared in this paper: Faster R-CNN, three variants of Faster R-CNN and an ensemble method; YOLOv3; YOLOv5; EfficientDet; and a new Cascade Attention Network. For each deep learning method, we provide a detailed description of model architecture, parameter settings for training and additional stages including pre-processing, data augmentation and post-processing. We provide a comprehensive evaluation for each method. All the methods required a data augmentation stage to increase the number of images available for training and a post-processing stage to remove false positives. The best performance is obtained Deformable Convolution, a variant of Faster R-CNN, with a mAP of 0.6940 and an F1-Score of 0.7434. Finally, we demonstrate that the ensemble method based on different deep learning methods can enhanced the F1-Score but not the mAP. Our results show that state-of-the-art deep learning methods can detect DFU with some accuracy, but there are many challenges ahead before they can be implemented in real world settings.