USMicroMagSet: Using Deep Learning Analysis to Benchmark the Performance of Microrobots in Ultrasound Images

Microscale robots introduce great perspectives into many medical applications such as drug delivery, minimally invasive surgery, and localized biometric diagnostics. Fully automatic microrobots' real-time detection and tracking using medical imagers are actually investigated for future clinical translation. Ultrasound (US) B-mode imaging has been employed to monitor single agents and collective swarms of microrobots
in vitro
and
ex vivo
in controlled experimental conditions. However, low contrast and spatial resolution still limit the effective employment of such a method in a medical microrobotic scenario due to uncertainties associated with the position of microrobots. The positioning error arises due to the inaccuracy of the US-based visual feedback, which is provided by the detection and tracking algorithms. The application of deep learning networks is a promising solution to detect and track real-time microrobots in noisy ultrasonic images. However, what is most striking is the performance gap among state-of-the-art microrobots deep learning detection and tracking research. A key factor of that is the unavailability of large-scale datasets and benchmarks. In this letter, we present the first publicly available B-mode ultrasound dataset for microrobots (
$\text{USmicroMagSet}$
) with accurate annotations which contains more than 40000 samples of magnetic microrobots. In addition, for analyzing the performance of microrobots included in the proposed benchmark dataset, 4 deep learning detectors and 4 deep learning trackers are used.