Prediction of remaining surgery duration in laparoscopic videos based on visual saliency and the transformer network.

Background: Real-time prediction of the remaining surgery duration (RSD) is important for optimal scheduling of resources in the operating room.

Methods: We focus on the intraoperative prediction of RSD from laparoscopic video. An extensive evaluation of seven common deep learning models, a proposed one based on the Transformer architecture (TransLocal) and four baseline approaches, is presented.