Shrinking data for surgical training
Laparoscopy is a surgical technique in which a fiber-optic camera is inserted into a patient’s abdominal cavity to provide a video feed that guides the surgeon through a minimally invasive procedure. Laparoscopic surgeries can take hours, and the video generated by the camera — the laparoscope — is often recorded. Those recordings contain a wealth of information that could be useful for training both medical providers and computer systems that would aid with surgery, but because reviewing them is so time consuming, they mostly sit idle. Researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital hope to change that, with a new system that can efficiently search through hundreds of hours of video for events and visual features that correspond to a few training examples. In work they presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation this month, the researchers trained their system to recognize different stages of an operation, such as biopsy, tissue...