Detecting the occluding contours of the uterus to automatise augmented laparoscopy: score, loss, dataset, evaluation and user study

Purpose The registration of a preoperative 3D model, reconstructed, for example, from MRI, to intraoperative laparoscopy 2D images, is the main challenge to achieve augmented reality in laparoscopy. The current systems have a major limitation: they require that the surgeon manually marks the occluding contours during surgery. This requires the surgeon to fully comprehend the non-trivial concept of occluding contours and surgeon time, directly impacting acceptance and usability. To overcome this limitation, we propose a complete framework for object-class occluding contour detection (OC2D), with application to uterus surgery. Methods Our first contribution is a new distance-based evaluation score complying with all the relevant performance criteria. Our second contribution is a loss function combining cross-entropy and two new penalties designed to boost 1-pixel thickness responses. This allows us to train a U-Net end to end, outperforming all competing methods, which tends to produce thick responses. Our third contribution is a dataset of 3818 carefully labelled laparoscopy images of the uterus, which was used to train and evaluate our detector. Results Evaluation shows that the proposed detector has a similar false false-negative rate to existing methods but substantially reduces both false-positive rate and response thickness. Finally, we ran a user study to evaluate the impact of OC2D against manually marked occluding contours in augmented laparoscopy. We used 10 recorded gynecologic laparoscopies and involved 5 surgeons. Using OC2D led to a reduction of 3 min and 53 s in surgeon time without sacrificing registration accuracy. Conclusions We provide a new set of criteria and a distance-based measure to evaluate an OC2D method. We propose an OC2D method which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The results obtained from the user study indicate that fully automatic augmented laparoscopy is feasible.