Development of a Deep Learning-Based Algorithm to Detect the Distal End of a Surgical Instrument

Abstract

This work aims to develop an algorithm to detect the distal end of a surgical instrument using object detection with deep learning. We employed nine video recordings of carotid endarterectomies for training and testing. We obtained regions of interest (ROI; 32 × 32 pixels), at the end of the surgical instrument on the video images, as supervised data. We applied data augmentation to these ROIs. We employed a You Only Look Once Version 2 (YOLOv2) -based convolutional neural network as the network model for training. The detectors were validated to evaluate average detection precision. The proposed algorithm used the central coordinates of the bounding boxes predicted by YOLOv2. Using the test data, we calculated the detection rate. The average precision (AP) for the ROIs, without data augmentation, was 0.4272 ± 0.108. The AP with data augmentation, of 0.7718 ± 0.0824, was significantly higher than that without data augmentation. The detection rates, including the calculated coordinates of the center points in the centers of 8 × 8 pixels and 16 × 16 pixels, were 0.6100 ± 0.1014 and 0.9653 ± 0.0177, respectively. We expect that the proposed algorithm will be efficient for the analysis of surgical records.