Automatic Instrument Segmentation in Robot-Assisted Surgery using Deep Learning

Semantic segmentation of robotic instruments is an important problem for the robot-assisted surgery. One of the main challenges is to correctly detect an instrument's position for the tracking and pose estimation in the vicinity of surgical scenes. Accurate pixel-wise instrument segmentation is needed to address this challenge. In this paper we describe our deep learning-based approach for robotic instrument segmentation. Our approach demonstrates an improvement over the state-of-the-art results using several deep neural network architectures. It addressed the binary segmentation problem, where every pixel in an image is labeled as an instrument or background from the surgery video feed. In addition, we address a multi-class segmentation problem, in which we distinguish between different instruments or different parts of an instrument from the background. In this setting, our approach outperforms other methods for automatic instrument segmentation thereby providing state-of-the-art results for these problems. The source code for our solution is made publicly available at https://github.com/ternaus/robot-surgery-segmentation.