Automatic Vessel Detection Technique in Laparoscopic Surgical Imaging Including Surgical Instruments

In this paper, we propose a new technique to recognize vessels in robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery images by using surgical instruments. The proposed method does not require additional hardware or parameter adjustment because it detects blood vessels by using only the color information of the image. The concept of a hessian matrix is used in the HSV color space of the image to detect the edges of the blood vessels. In addition, the histogram equalization technique, clustering technique, and region growing are used to remove the surgical tools. Images of actual robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery videos were used. The processing speed was approximately 0.3 s per frame at 640p and approximately 0.8 s per frame at 1280p. The average recall was 92.67%.