Surgical Instrument Tracking for Vitreo-retinal Eye Surgical Procedures Using ARAS-EYE Dataset

Real-time instrument tracking is an essential element of minimally invasive surgery and has several applications in computer-assisted analysis and interventions. However, the instrument tracking is very challenging in the vitreo-retinal eye surgical procedures owing to the limited workspace of surgery, illumination variation, flexibility of the instruments, etc. In this article, as a powerful technique to detect and track surgical instruments, it is suggested to employ a convolutional neural network (CNN) alongside a newly produced ARAS-EYE dataset and OpenCV trackers. To clarify, firstly you only look once (YOLOv3) CNN is employed to detect the instruments. Thereafter, the Median-flow OpenCV tracker is utilized to track the determined objects. To modify the tracker, every “ n” frames, the CNN runs over the image and the tracker is updated. Moreover, the dataset consists of 594 images in which four “shaft”, “center”, “laser”, and “gripper” labels are considered. Utilizing the trained CNN, experiments are conducted to verify the applicability of the proposed approach. Finally, the outcomes are discussed and a conclusion is presented. Results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in detection and tracking of surgical instruments which may be used for several applications.