ROBUST-MIPS: A Combined Skeletal Pose and Instance Segmentation Dataset for Laparoscopic Surgical Instruments
This work addresses data scarcity for computer-assisted surgical technologies by proposing a more efficient annotation method, though it is incremental as it builds on an existing dataset.
The authors tackled the problem of limited annotated data for surgical tool localization by introducing ROBUST-MIPS, a dataset combining skeletal pose and instance segmentation annotations derived from ROBUST-MIS, which achieved high-quality results in pose estimation benchmarks.
Localisation of surgical tools constitutes a foundational building block for computer-assisted interventional technologies. Works in this field typically focus on training deep learning models to perform segmentation tasks. Performance of learning-based approaches is limited by the availability of diverse annotated data. We argue that skeletal pose annotations are a more efficient annotation approach for surgical tools, striking a balance between richness of semantic information and ease of annotation, thus allowing for accelerated growth of available annotated data. To encourage adoption of this annotation style, we present, ROBUST-MIPS, a combined tool pose and tool instance segmentation dataset derived from the existing ROBUST-MIS dataset. Our enriched dataset facilitates the joint study of these two annotation styles and allow head-to-head comparison on various downstream tasks. To demonstrate the adequacy of pose annotations for surgical tool localisation, we set up a simple benchmark using popular pose estimation methods and observe high-quality results. To ease adoption, together with the dataset, we release our benchmark models and custom tool pose annotation software.