TSP-OCS: A Time-Series Prediction for Optimal Camera Selection in Multi-Viewpoint Surgical Video Analysis

Recording the open surgery process is essential for educational and medical evaluation purposes; however, traditional single-camera methods often face challenges such as occlusions caused by the surgeon's head and body, as well as limitations due to fixed camera angles, which reduce comprehensibility of the video content. This study addresses these limitations by employing a multi-viewpoint camera recording system, capturing the surgical procedure from six different angles to mitigate occlusions. We propose a fully supervised learning-based time series prediction method to choose the best shot sequences from multiple simultaneously recorded video streams, ensuring optimal viewpoints at each moment. Our time series prediction model forecasts future camera selections by extracting and fusing visual and semantic features from surgical videos using pre-trained models. These features are processed by a temporal prediction network with TimeBlocks to capture sequential dependencies. A linear embedding layer reduces dimensionality, and a Softmax classifier selects the optimal camera view based on the highest probability. In our experiments, we created five groups of open thyroidectomy videos, each with simultaneous recordings from six different angles. The results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive accuracy compared to traditional supervised methods, even when predicting over longer time horizons. Furthermore, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art time series prediction techniques on our dataset. This manuscript makes a unique contribution by presenting an innovative framework that advances surgical video analysis techniques, with significant implications for improving surgical education and patient safety.