Mostafa Daneshgar Rahbar

Background: Open surgery relies heavily on the surgeon’s visual acuity and spatial awareness to track instruments within a dynamic and often cluttered surgical field. Methods: This system utilizes a head-mounted depth camera to monitor surgical scenes, providing both image data and depth information. The video captured from this camera is scaled down, compressed using MPEG, and transmitted to a high-performance workstation via the RTSP (Real-Time Streaming Protocol), a reliable protocol designed for real-time media transmission. To segment surgical instruments, we utilize the enhanced U-Net with GridMask (EUGNet) for its proven effectiveness in surgical tool segmentation. Results: For rigorous validation, the system’s performance reliability and accuracy are evaluated using prerecorded RGB-D surgical videos. This work demonstrates the potential of this system to improve situational awareness, surgical efficiency, and generate data-driven insights within the operating room. In a simulated surgical environment, the system achieves a high accuracy of 85.5% in identifying and segmenting surgical instruments. Furthermore, the wireless video transmission proves reliable with a latency of 200 ms, suitable for real-time processing. Conclusions: These findings represent a promising step towards the development of assistive technologies with the potential to significantly enhance surgical practice.

A single paragraph of about 200 words maximum. For research articles, abstracts should give a pertinent overview of the work. We strongly encourage authors to use the following style of structured abstracts, but without headings: (1) Background: Place the question addressed in a broad context and highlight the purpose of the study; (2) Methods: briefly describe the main methods or treatments applied; (3) Results: summarize the article’s main findings; (4) Conclusions: indicate the main conclusions or interpretations. The abstract should be an objective representation of the article and it must not contain results that are not presented and substantiated in the main text and should not exaggerate the main conclusions.

This study proposed enhanced U-Net with GridMask (EUGNet) image augmentation techniques focused on pixel manipulation, emphasizing GridMask augmentation. This study introduces EUGNet, which incorporates GridMask augmentation to address U-Net’s limitations. EUGNet features a deep contextual encoder, residual connections, class-balancing loss, adaptive feature fusion, GridMask augmentation module, efficient implementation, and multi-modal fusion. These innovations enhance segmentation accuracy and robustness, making it well-suited for medical image analysis. The GridMask algorithm is detailed, demonstrating its distinct approach to pixel elimination, enhancing model adaptability to occlusions and local features. A comprehensive dataset of robotic surgical scenarios and instruments is used for evaluation, showcasing the framework’s robustness. Specifically, there are improvements of 1.6 percentage points in balanced accuracy for the foreground, 1.7 points in intersection over union (IoU), and 1.7 points in mean Dice similarity coefficient (DSC). These improvements are highly significant and have a substantial impact on inference speed. The inference speed, which is a critical factor in real-time applications, has seen a noteworthy reduction. It decreased from 0.163 milliseconds for the U-Net without GridMask to 0.097 milliseconds for the U-Net with GridMask.

Unintentional vascular damage can result from a surgical instrument’s abrupt movements during minimally invasive surgery (laparoscopic or robotic). A novel real-time image processing algorithm based on local entropy is proposed that can detect abrupt movements of surgical instruments and predict bleeding occurrence. The uniform nature of the texture of surgical tools is utilized to segment the tools from the background. By comparing changes in entropy over time, the algorithm determines when the surgical instruments are moved abruptly. We tested the algorithm using 17 videos of minimally invasive surgery, 11 of which had tool-induced bleeding. Our preliminary testing shows that the algorithm is 88% accurate and 90% precise in predicting bleeding. The average advance warning time for the 11 videos is 0.662 s, with the standard deviation being 0.427 s. The proposed approach has the potential to eventually lead to a surgical early warning system or even proactively attenuate tool movement (for robotic surgery) to avoid dangerous surgical outcomes.

Background During minimally invasive surgery (either robotic or traditional laparoscopic), vascular injuries may occur because of inadvertent surgical tool movements or actions. These vascular injuries can lead to arterial or venous bleeding with varying degrees of severity that may be life-threatening. Materials and Methods Given that a bloody spot is characterized by homogenous and uniform texture, tOur algorithm automatically scans the entire surgical video frame- by- frame using a local entropy filter to segment each image into different regionssequence. By comparing changes in entropy in the framessequencesovti, the algorithm detects the moment of bleeding occurrence and its pixel location. We preliminarily tested the algorithm using ten minimally invasive-surgery videos., each of which contains one surgical-tool-induced bleeding. Results Our results show that the algorithm can detect bleeding within 0.635 s, on average, after their occurrences and locate the bleeding sources within, on average, 2.5% of discrepancy in pixels from their origins. Conclusion In this study, we present a novel and promising local-entropy-based image processing algorithm that detects spurts of blood and locate their source in real-time.