3 research outputs found
End-to-End Real-time Catheter Segmentation with Optical Flow-Guided Warping during Endovascular Intervention
Accurate real-time catheter segmentation is an important pre-requisite for
robot-assisted endovascular intervention. Most of the existing learning-based
methods for catheter segmentation and tracking are only trained on small-scale
datasets or synthetic data due to the difficulties of ground-truth annotation.
Furthermore, the temporal continuity in intraoperative imaging sequences is not
fully utilised. In this paper, we present FW-Net, an end-to-end and real-time
deep learning framework for endovascular intervention. The proposed FW-Net has
three modules: a segmentation network with encoder-decoder architecture, a flow
network to extract optical flow information, and a novel flow-guided warping
function to learn the frame-to-frame temporal continuity. We show that by
effectively learning temporal continuity, the network can successfully segment
and track the catheters in real-time sequences using only raw ground-truth for
training. Detailed validation results confirm that our FW-Net outperforms
state-of-the-art techniques while achieving real-time performance.Comment: ICRA 202
Context-aware learning for robot-assisted endovascular catheterization
Endovascular intervention has become a mainstream treatment of cardiovascular diseases. However, multiple challenges remain such as unwanted radiation exposures, limited two-dimensional image guidance, insufficient force perception and haptic cues. Fast evolving robot-assisted platforms improve the stability and accuracy of instrument manipulation. The master-slave system also removes radiation to the operator. However, the integration of robotic systems into the current surgical workflow is still debatable since repetitive, easy tasks have little value to be executed by the robotic teleoperation. Current systems offer very low autonomy, potential autonomous features could bring more benefits such as reduced cognitive workloads and human error, safer and more consistent instrument manipulation, ability to incorporate various medical imaging and sensing modalities. This research proposes frameworks for automated catheterisation with different machine learning-based algorithms, includes Learning-from-Demonstration, Reinforcement Learning, and Imitation Learning. Those frameworks focused on integrating context for tasks in the process of skill learning, hence achieving better adaptation to different situations and safer tool-tissue interactions. Furthermore, the autonomous feature was applied to next-generation, MR-safe robotic catheterisation platform. The results provide important insights into improving catheter navigation in the form of autonomous task planning, self-optimization with clinical relevant factors, and motivate the design of intelligent, intuitive, and collaborative robots under non-ionizing image modalities.Open Acces