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Towards Holistic Surgical Scene Understanding

Natalia Valderrama, Paola Ruiz Puentes, Isabela Hernández, Nicolás Ayobi, Mathilde Verlyck, Jessica Santander, Juan Caicedo, Nicolás Fernández and Pablo Arbeláez.

MICCAI 2022 (Oral)

Abstract

Most benchmarks for studying surgical interventions focus on a specific challenge instead of leveraging the intrinsic complementarity among different tasks. In this work, we present a new experimental framework towards holistic surgical scene understanding. First, we introduce the Phase, Step, Instrument, and Atomic Visual Action recognition (PSIAVA) Dataset. PSI-AVA includes annotations for both long-term (Phase and Step recognition) and short-term reasoning (Instrument detection
and novel Atomic Action recognition) in robot-assisted radical prostatectomy videos. Second, we present Transformers for Action, Phase, Instrument, and steps Recognition (TAPIR) as a strong baseline for surgical scene understanding. TAPIR leverages our dataset’s multi-level annotations as it benefits from the learned representation on the instrument detection task to improve its classification capacity. Our experimental results in both PSI-AVA and other publicly available databases demonstrate the adequacy of our framework to spur future research on holistic surgical scene understanding.