Guided image generation for improved surgical image segmentation.

The lack of large datasets and high-quality annotated data often limits the development of accurate and robust machine-learning models within the medical and surgical domains. In the machine learning community, generative models have recently demonstrated that it is possible to produce novel and diverse synthetic images that closely resemble reality while controlling their content with various types of annotations. However, generative models have not been yet fully explored in the surgical domain, partially due to the lack of large datasets and due to specific challenges present in the surgical domain such as the large anatomical diversity.

DIPO: Differentiable Parallel Operation Blocks for Surgical Neural Architecture Search.

Deep learning has been used across a large number of computer vision tasks, however designing the network architectures for each task is time consuming. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) promises to automatically build neural networks, optimised for the given task and dataset. However, most NAS methods are constrained to a specific macro-architecture design which makes it hard to apply to different tasks (classification, detection, segmentation).

A spatio-temporal network for video semantic segmentation in surgical videos.

Purpose: Semantic segmentation in surgical videos has applications in intra-operative guidance, post-operative analytics and surgical education. Models need to provide accurate predictions since temporally inconsistent identification of anatomy can hinder patient safety. We propose a novel architecture for modelling temporal relationships in videos to address these issues.

Data-centric multi-task surgical phase estimation with sparse scene segmentation.

Purpose: Surgical workflow estimation techniques aim to divide a surgical video into temporal segments based on predefined surgical actions or objectives, which can be of different granularity such as steps or phases. Potential applications range from real-time intra-operative feedback to automatic post-operative reports and analysis. A common approach in the literature for performing automatic surgical phase estimation is to decouple the problem into two stages: feature extraction from a single frame and temporal feature fusion.