A. Jonathan McLeod

Max Allan, Jonathan Mcleod, Congcong Wang et al.

The stereo correspondence and reconstruction of endoscopic data sub-challenge was organized during the Endovis challenge at MICCAI 2019 in Shenzhen, China. The task was to perform dense depth estimation using 7 training datasets and 2 test sets of structured light data captured using porcine cadavers. These were provided by a team at Intuitive Surgical. 10 teams participated in the challenge day. This paper contains 3 additional methods which were submitted after the challenge finished as well as a supplemental section from these teams on issues they found with the dataset.

Yidan Qin, Sahba Aghajani Pedram, Seyedshams Feyzabadi et al.

Many tasks in robot-assisted surgeries (RAS) can be represented by finite-state machines (FSMs), where each state represents either an action (such as picking up a needle) or an observation (such as bleeding). A crucial step towards the automation of such surgical tasks is the temporal perception of the current surgical scene, which requires a real-time estimation of the states in the FSMs. The objective of this work is to estimate the current state of the surgical task based on the actions performed or events occurred as the task progresses. We propose Fusion-KVE, a unified surgical state estimation model that incorporates multiple data sources including the Kinematics, Vision, and system Events. Additionally, we examine the strengths and weaknesses of different state estimation models in segmenting states with different representative features or levels of granularity. We evaluate our model on the JHU-ISI Gesture and Skill Assessment Working Set (JIGSAWS), as well as a more complex dataset involving robotic intra-operative ultrasound (RIOUS) imaging, created using the da Vinci Xi surgical system. Our model achieves a superior frame-wise state estimation accuracy up to 89.4%, which improves the state-of-the-art surgical state estimation models in both JIGSAWS suturing dataset and our RIOUS dataset.

John S. H. Baxter, Jonathan McLeod, Terry M. Peters

Reconstruction of an image from noisy data using Markov Random Field theory has been explored by both the graph-cuts and continuous max-flow community in the form of the Potts and Ishikawa models. However, neither model takes into account the particular cyclic topology of specific intensity types such as the hue in natural colour images, or the phase in complex valued MRI. This paper presents \textit{cyclic continuous max-flow} image reconstruction which models the intensity being reconstructed as having a fundamentally cyclic topology. This model complements the Ishikawa model in that it is designed with image reconstruction in mind, having the topology of the intensity space inherent in the model while being readily extendable to an arbitrary intensity resolution.