Rongfeng Wei

Rongfeng Wei, Jinlin Wu, Xuexue Bai et al.

In minimally invasive surgery, surgical instrument localization is a crucial task for endoscopic videos, which enables various applications for improving surgical outcomes. However, annotating the instrument localization in endoscopic videos is tedious and labor-intensive. In contrast, obtaining the category information is easy and efficient in real-world applications. To fully utilize the category information and address the localization problem, we propose a weakly supervised localization framework named WS-YOLO for surgical instruments. By leveraging the instrument category information as the weak supervision, our WS-YOLO framework adopts an unsupervised multi-round training strategy for the localization capability training. We validate our WS-YOLO framework on the Endoscopic Vision Challenge 2023 dataset, which achieves remarkable performance in the weakly supervised surgical instrument localization. The source code is available at https://github.com/Breezewrf/WS-YOLO.

Rongfeng Wei

In recent years as the internet age continues to grow, sharing images on social media has become a common occurrence. In certain cases, watermarks are used as protection for the ownership of the image, however, in more cases, one may wish to remove these watermark images to get the original image without obscuring. In this work, we proposed a deep learning method based technique for visual watermark removal. Inspired by the strong image translation performance of the U-structure, an end-to-end deep neural network model named AdvancedUnet is proposed to extract and remove the visual watermark simultaneously. On the other hand, we embed some effective RSU module instead of the common residual block used in UNet, which increases the depth of the whole architecture without significantly increasing the computational cost. The deep-supervised hybrid loss guides the network to learn the transformation between the input image and the ground truth in a multi-scale and three-level hierarchy. Comparison experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Aneeq Zia, Max Berniker, Rogerio Garcia Nespolo et al.

Robotic assisted (RA) surgery promises to transform surgical intervention. Intuitive Surgical is committed to fostering these changes and the machine learning models and algorithms that will enable them. With these goals in mind we have invited the surgical data science community to participate in a yearly competition hosted through the Medical Imaging Computing and Computer Assisted Interventions (MICCAI) conference. With varying changes from year to year, we have challenged the community to solve difficult machine learning problems in the context of advanced RA applications. Here we document the results of these challenges, focusing on surgical tool localization (SurgToolLoc). The publicly released dataset that accompanies these challenges is detailed in a separate paper arXiv:2501.09209 [1].