Tool Detection and Operative Skill Assessment in Surgical Videos Using Region-Based Convolutional Neural Networks

Five billion people in the world lack access to quality surgical care. Surgeon skill varies dramatically, and many surgical patients suffer complications and avoidable harm. Improving surgical training and feedback would help to reduce the rate of complications, half of which have been shown to be preventable. To do this, it is essential to assess operative skill, a process that currently requires experts and is manual, time consuming, and subjective. In this work, we introduce an approach to automatically assess surgeon performance by tracking and analyzing tool movements in surgical videos, leveraging region-based convolutional neural networks. In order to study this problem, we also introduce a new dataset, m2cai16-tool-locations, which extends the m2cai16-tool dataset with spatial bounds of tools. While previous methods have addressed tool presence detection, ours is the first to not only detect presence but also spatially localize surgical tools in real-world laparoscopic surgical videos. We show that our method both effectively detects the spatial bounds of tools as well as significantly outperforms existing methods on tool presence detection. We further demonstrate the ability of our method to assess surgical quality through analysis of tool usage patterns, movement range, and economy of motion.

Towards Vision-Based Smart Hospitals: A System for Tracking and Monitoring Hand Hygiene Compliance

One in twenty-five patients admitted to a hospital will suffer from a hospital acquired infection. If we can intelligently track healthcare staff, patients, and visitors, we can better understand the sources of such infections. We envision a smart hospital capable of increasing operational efficiency and improving patient care with less spending. In this paper, we propose a non-intrusive vision-based system for tracking people's activity in hospitals. We evaluate our method for the problem of measuring hand hygiene compliance. Empirically, our method outperforms existing solutions such as proximity-based techniques and covert in-person observational studies. We present intuitive, qualitative results that analyze human movement patterns and conduct spatial analytics which convey our method's interpretability. This work is a step towards a computer-vision based smart hospital and demonstrates promising results for reducing hospital acquired infections.