Geonhee Lee

Haozheng Xu, Alistair Weld, Chi Xu et al.

Accurate instrument pose estimation is a crucial step towards the future of robotic surgery, enabling applications such as autonomous surgical task execution. Vision-based methods for surgical instrument pose estimation provide a practical approach to tool tracking, but they often require markers to be attached to the instruments. Recently, more research has focused on the development of marker-less methods based on deep learning. However, acquiring realistic surgical data, with ground truth instrument poses, required for deep learning training, is challenging. To address the issues in surgical instrument pose estimation, we introduce the Surgical Robot Instrument Pose Estimation (SurgRIPE) challenge, hosted at the 26th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) in 2023. The objectives of this challenge are: (1) to provide the surgical vision community with realistic surgical video data paired with ground truth instrument poses, and (2) to establish a benchmark for evaluating markerless pose estimation methods. The challenge led to the development of several novel algorithms that showcased improved accuracy and robustness over existing methods. The performance evaluation study on the SurgRIPE dataset highlights the potential of these advanced algorithms to be integrated into robotic surgery systems, paving the way for more precise and autonomous surgical procedures. The SurgRIPE challenge has successfully established a new benchmark for the field, encouraging further research and development in surgical robot instrument pose estimation.

Dongsuk Kim, Geonhee Lee, Myungjae Lee et al.

We introduce a Normalized Convolutional Neural Layer, a novel approach to normalization in convolutional networks. Unlike conventional methods, this layer normalizes the rows of the im2col matrix during convolution, making it inherently adaptive to sliced inputs and better aligned with kernel structures. This distinctive approach differentiates it from standard normalization techniques and prevents direct integration into existing deep learning frameworks optimized for traditional convolution operations. Our method has a universal property, making it applicable to any deep learning task involving convolutional layers. By inherently normalizing within the convolution process, it serves as a convolutional adaptation of Self-Normalizing Networks, maintaining their core principles without requiring additional normalization layers. Notably, in micro-batch training scenarios, it consistently outperforms other batch-independent normalization methods. This performance boost arises from standardizing the rows of the im2col matrix, which theoretically leads to a smoother loss gradient and improved training stability.