Surgical Instrument Detection for Laparoscopic Surgery using Deep Learning

Laparoscopic surgery has transformed conventional open surgery. Robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery which is minimally invasive is effective for operations in limited space. Nevertheless, the robotic system which is utilized in such surgery can inflict impair to the surgical instruments, organs, or tissues as a consequence of the narrow field of view and space available to operate, and insufficient tactile response. In laparoscopy, the surgeon observes what he operates via digital images which are displayed on a monitor. In addition to the surgeon’s expertise, the image-guided surgery system could offer him significant support if that system is capable of understanding those images. Computer Vision has been able to proceed due to the emergence of Machine Learning, and especially Deep Learning. This paper applies Deep Learning for surgical instrument detection for laparoscopic surgery. The fastest model, based on results trained on the COCO 2017 Dataset on TensorFlow Framework, for each of 4 algorithms - Faster-RCNN, SSD, CenterNet and EfficientDet - from Model Zoo, along with YOLOv4 on Darknet Framework, have been investigated in this work. The evaluation metrics used are Precision, Recall and F1-score. The results reveal that each model plays its part well; however, YOLOv4 seemed to breakthrough this statement by offering grate result for all three accuracy metrics.