Improving cataract surgery procedure using machine learning and thick data analysis

Cataract surgery is one of the most frequent and safe Surgical operations are done globally, with approximately 16 million surgeries conducted each year. The entire operation is carried out under microscopical supervision. Even though ophthalmic surgeries are similar in some ways to endoscopic surgeries, the way they are set up is very different. Endoscopic surgery operations were shown on a big screen so that a trainee surgeon could see them. Cataract surgery, on the other hand, was done under a microscope so that only the operating surgeon and one more trainee could see them through additional oculars. Since surgery video is recorded for future reference, the trainee surgeon watches the full video again for learning purposes. My proposed framework could be helpful for trainee surgeons to better understand the cataract surgery workflow. The framework is made up of three assistive parts: figuring out how serious cataract surgery is; if surgery is needed, what phases are needed to be done to perform surgery; and what are the problems that could happen during the surgery. In this framework, three training models has been used with different datasets to answer all these questions. The training models include models that help to learn technical skills as well as thick data heuristics to provide non-technical training skills. For video analysis, big data and deep learning are used in many studies of cataract surgery. Deep learning requires lots of data to train a model, while thick data requires a small amount of data to find a result. We have used thick data and expert heuristics to develop our proposed framework.Thick data analysis reduced the use of lots of data and also allowed us to understand the qualitative nature of data in order to shape a proposed cataract surgery workflow framework

Surgical skill assessment using motion texture analysis

In this thesis, we propose a framework for automated assessment of surgical skills to expedite the manual assessment process and to provide unbiased evaluations with possible dexterity feedback. Evaluation of surgical skills is an important aspect in training of medical students. Current practices rely on manual evaluations from faculty and residents and are time consuming. Proposed solutions in literature involve retrospective evaluations such as watching the offline videos. It requires precious time and attention of expert surgeons and may vary from one surgeon to another. With recent advancements in computer vision and machine learning techniques, the retrospective video evaluation can be best delegated to the computer algorithms. Skill assessment is a challenging task requiring expert domain knowledge that may be difficult to translate into algorithms. To emulate this human observation process, an appropriate data collection mechanism is required to track motion of the surgeon's hand in an unrestricted manner. In addition, it is essential to identify skill defining motion dynamics and skill relevant hand locations. This Ph.D. research aims to address the limitations of manual skill assessment by developing an automated motion analysis framework. Specifically, we propose (1) to design and implement quantitative features to capture fine motion details from surgical video data, (2) to identify and test the efficacy of a core subset of features in classifying the surgical students into different expertise levels, (3) to derive absolute skill scores using regression methods and (4) to perform dexterity analysis using motion data from different hand locations.Ph.D

Human-Centric Machine Vision

Recently, the algorithms for the processing of the visual information have greatly evolved, providing efficient and effective solutions to cope with the variability and the complexity of real-world environments. These achievements yield to the development of Machine Vision systems that overcome the typical industrial applications, where the environments are controlled and the tasks are very specific, towards the use of innovative solutions to face with everyday needs of people. The Human-Centric Machine Vision can help to solve the problems raised by the needs of our society, e.g. security and safety, health care, medical imaging, and human machine interface. In such applications it is necessary to handle changing, unpredictable and complex situations, and to take care of the presence of humans

Tracking the Temporal-Evolution of Supernova Bubbles in Numerical Simulations

The study of low-dimensional, noisy manifolds embedded in a higher dimensional space has been extremely useful in many applications, from the chemical analysis of multi-phase flows to simulations of galactic mergers. Building a probabilistic model of the manifolds has helped in describing their essential properties and how they vary in space. However, when the manifold is evolving through time, a joint spatio-temporal modelling is needed, in order to fully comprehend its nature. We propose a first-order Markovian process that propagates the spatial probabilistic model of a manifold at fixed time, to its adjacent temporal stages. The proposed methodology is demonstrated using a particle simulation of an interacting dwarf galaxy to describe the evolution of a cavity generated by a Supernov