SurgRIPE challenge: Benchmark of surgical robot instrument pose estimation

Accurate instrument pose estimation is a crucial step towards the future of robotic surgery, enabling applications such as autonomous surgical task execution. Vision-based methods for surgical instrument pose estimation provide a practical approach to tool tracking, but they often require markers to be attached to the instruments. Recently, more research has focused on the development of markerless methods based on deep learning. However, acquiring realistic surgical data, with ground truth (GT) instrument poses, required for deep learning training, is challenging. To address the issues in surgical instrument pose estimation, we introduce the Surgical Robot Instrument Pose Estimation (SurgRIPE) challenge, hosted at the 26th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) in 2023. The objectives of this challenge are: (1) to provide the surgical vision community with realistic surgical video data paired with ground truth instrument poses, and (2) to establish a benchmark for evaluating markerless pose estimation methods. The challenge led to the development of several novel algorithms that showcased improved accuracy and robustness over existing methods. The performance evaluation study on the SurgRIPE dataset highlights the potential of these advanced algorithms to be integrated into robotic surgery systems, paving the way for more precise and autonomous surgical procedures. The SurgRIPE challenge has successfully established a new benchmark for the field, encouraging further research and development in surgical robot instrument pose estimation

Improving the Lipophilic Antioxidant Activity of Poultry Protein Hydrolisates Through Chemical Esterification

Purpose: Poultry protein hydrolysates (PPHs) are obtained as by-product of poultry slaughter industry using bio catalytic hydrolysis. These protein hydrolysates have good antioxidant properties, which make them potential functional ingredient to prevent the oxidation of meat derived products. However, protein hydrolysates have a poor solubility in lipid media. Methods: To increase the solubilisation in the lipid phase, thus improving antioxidant properties on the fatty acids, several esterification reactions were carried out using different alcohols. The reactions were monitored by LC–MS and the shift in antioxidant activity was assessed with hydrophilic and lipophilic ABTS assay. Results: A good increase in the lipophilicity of the esterified PPHs is shown, proportional to the increase of the alcohol chain length. Accordingly, a significant increase of the lipophilic antioxidant activity, especially for longest chain alcohols, was also observed. Conclusions: These results indicated that the chemical esterification of PPHs with food-grade long chain alcohol can be a valuable approach to increase the lipophilic antioxidant properties of these products. Graphical Abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.]