5 research outputs found

    Image Compositing for Segmentation of Surgical Tools Without Manual Annotations

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    Producing manual, pixel-accurate, image segmentation labels is tedious and time-consuming. This is often a rate-limiting factor when large amounts of labeled images are required, such as for training deep convolutional networks for instrument-background segmentation in surgical scenes. No large datasets comparable to industry standards in the computer vision community are available for this task. To circumvent this problem, we propose to automate the creation of a realistic training dataset by exploiting techniques stemming from special effects and harnessing them to target training performance rather than visual appeal. Foreground data is captured by placing sample surgical instruments over a chroma key (a.k.a. green screen) in a controlled environment, thereby making extraction of the relevant image segment straightforward. Multiple lighting conditions and viewpoints can be captured and introduced in the simulation by moving the instruments and camera and modulating the light source. Background data is captured by collecting videos that do not contain instruments. In the absence of pre-existing instrument-free background videos, minimal labeling effort is required, just to select frames that do not contain surgical instruments from videos of surgical interventions freely available online. We compare different methods to blend instruments over tissue and propose a novel data augmentation approach that takes advantage of the plurality of options. We show that by training a vanilla U-Net on semi-synthetic data only and applying a simple post-processing, we are able to match the results of the same network trained on a publicly available manually labeled real dataset

    Concurrent Segmentation and Localization for Tracking of Surgical Instruments

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    Real-time instrument tracking is a crucial requirement for various computer-assisted interventions. In order to overcome problems such as specular reflections and motion blur, we propose a novel method that takes advantage of the interdependency between localization and segmentation of the surgical tool. In particular, we reformulate the 2D instrument pose estimation as heatmap regression and thereby enable a concurrent, robust and near real-time regression of both tasks via deep learning. As demonstrated by our experimental results, this modeling leads to a significantly improved performance than directly regressing the tool position and allows our method to outperform the state of the art on a Retinal Microsurgery benchmark and the MICCAI EndoVis Challenge 2015.Comment: I. Laina and N. Rieke contributed equally to this work. Accepted to MICCAI 201

    3D-printed multifunctional materials enabled by artificial-intelligence-assisted fabrication technologies

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