Surgical tool segmentation and localization using spatio-temporal deep network.

Laparoscopic cholecystectomy surgery is a minimally invasive surgery to remove the gallbladder, where surgical instruments are inserted through small incisions in the abdomen with the help of a laparoscope. Identification of tool presence and precise segmentation of tools from the video is very important in understanding the quality of the surgery and training budding surgeons. Precise segmentation of tools is required to track the tools during real-time surgeries. In this paper, a new pixel-wise instance segmentation algorithm is proposed, which segments and localizes the surgical tool using spatio-temporal deep network. The performance of the proposed has been compared with the state-of-the-art image-based instance segmentation method using the Cholec80 dataset. It is also compared with methods in the literature using frame-level presence detection and spatial detection with good results.