SurgRIPE challenge: Benchmark of Surgical Robot Instrument Pose Estimation

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.

Realistic Surgical Image Dataset Generation Based On 3D Gaussian Splatting

Computer vision technologies markedly enhance the automation capabilities of robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS) through advanced tool tracking, detection, and localization. However, the limited availability of comprehensive surgical datasets for training represents a significant challenge in this field. This research introduces a novel method that employs 3D Gaussian Splatting to generate synthetic surgical datasets. We propose a method for extracting and combining 3D Gaussian representations of surgical instruments and background operating environments, transforming and combining them to generate high-fidelity synthetic surgical scenarios. We developed a data recording system capable of acquiring images alongside tool and camera poses in a surgical scene. Using this pose data, we synthetically replicate the scene, thereby enabling direct comparisons of the synthetic image quality (29.592 PSNR). As a further validation, we compared two YOLOv5 models trained on the synthetic and real data, respectively, and assessed their performance in an unseen real-world test dataset. Comparing the performances, we observe an improvement in neural network performance, with the synthetic-trained model outperforming the real-world trained model by 12%, testing both on real-world data.