Adaptive Graph Learning from Spatial Information for Surgical Workflow Anticipation

Surgical workflow anticipation is the task of predicting the timing of relevant surgical events from live video data, which is critical in Robotic-Assisted Surgery (RAS). Accurate predictions require the use of spatial information to model surgical interactions. However, current methods focus solely on surgical instruments, assume static interactions between instruments, and only anticipate surgical events within a fixed time horizon. To address these challenges, we propose an adaptive graph learning framework for surgical workflow anticipation based on a novel spatial representation, featuring three key innovations. First, we introduce a new representation of spatial information based on bounding boxes of surgical instruments and targets, including their detection confidence levels. These are trained on additional annotations we provide for two benchmark datasets. Second, we design an adaptive graph learning method to capture dynamic interactions. Third, we develop a multi-horizon objective that balances learning objectives for different time horizons, allowing for unconstrained predictions. Evaluations on two benchmarks reveal superior performance in short-to-mid-term anticipation, with an error reduction of approximately 3% for surgical phase anticipation and 9% for remaining surgical duration anticipation. These performance improvements demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and highlight its potential for enhancing preparation and coordination within the RAS team. This can improve surgical safety and the efficiency of operating room usage.

Depth-Aware Endoscopic Video Inpainting

Video inpainting fills in corrupted video content with plausible replacements. While recent advances in endoscopic video inpainting have shown potential for enhancing the quality of endoscopic videos, they mainly repair 2D visual information without effectively preserving crucial 3D spatial details for clinical reference. Depth-aware inpainting methods attempt to preserve these details by incorporating depth information. Still, in endoscopic contexts, they face challenges including reliance on pre-acquired depth maps, less effective fusion designs, and ignorance of the fidelity of 3D spatial details. To address them, we introduce a novel Depth-aware Endoscopic Video Inpainting (DAEVI) framework. It features a Spatial-Temporal Guided Depth Estimation module for direct depth estimation from visual features, a Bi-Modal Paired Channel Fusion module for effective channel-by-channel fusion of visual and depth information, and a Depth Enhanced Discriminator to assess the fidelity of the RGB-D sequence comprised of the inpainted frames and estimated depth images. Experimental evaluations on established benchmarks demonstrate our framework's superiority, achieving a 2% improvement in PSNR and a 6% reduction in MSE compared to state-of-the-art methods. Qualitative analyses further validate its enhanced ability to inpaint fine details, highlighting the benefits of integrating depth information into endoscopic inpainting.