Self-Supervised Generative Adversarial Network for Depth Estimation in Laparoscopic Images

Dense depth estimation and 3D reconstruction of a surgical scene are crucial steps in computer assisted surgery. Recent work has shown that depth estimation from a stereo images pair could be solved with convolutional neural networks. However, most recent depth estimation models were trained on datasets with per-pixel ground truth. Such data is especially rare for laparoscopic imaging, making it hard to apply supervised depth estimation to real surgical applications. To overcome this limitation, we propose SADepth, a new self-supervised depth estimation method based on Generative Adversarial Networks. It consists of an encoder-decoder generator and a discriminator to incorporate geometry constraints during training. Multi-scale outputs from the generator help to solve the local minima caused by the photometric reprojection loss, while the adversarial learning improves the framework generation quality. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that SADepth outperforms recent state-of-the-art unsupervised methods by a large margin, and reduces the gap between supervised and unsupervised depth estimation in laparoscopic images.

Deep Learning in Medical Ultrasound Image Segmentation: a Review

Applying machine learning technologies, especially deep learning, into medical image segmentation is being widely studied because of its state-of-the-art performance and results. It can be a key step to provide a reliable basis for clinical diagnosis, such as 3D reconstruction of human tissues, image-guided interventions, image analyzing and visualization. In this review article, deep-learning-based methods for ultrasound image segmentation are categorized into six main groups according to their architectures and training at first. Secondly, for each group, several current representative algorithms are selected, introduced, analyzed and summarized in detail. In addition, common evaluation methods for image segmentation and ultrasound image segmentation datasets are summarized. Further, the performance of the current methods and their evaluations are reviewed. In the end, the challenges and potential research directions for medical ultrasound image segmentation are discussed.