The evaluation of synthetic datasets on training AlexNet for surgical tool detection

Abstract

Surgical tool recognition is a key task to analyze surgical workflow, in order to improve the efficiency and safety of laparoscopic surgeries. The laparoscopic videos are important sources to conduct this task, However, there are some challenges to analyze these videos. Focus on the imbalanced dataset problem, data augmentation method based on generate different synthetic datasets and evaluate their performance training on a convolutional neural network model are investigated in this research. The results show the effect on the model with different background patterns. A better performance was achieved when the model was trained by a structure background dataset. Further research will be needed to understand why the original background patterns support the correct classification. It is assumed that this is an overlearning effect, that will not hold if other procedures were included into the test set.

Keywords

• surgical tool recognition
• convolutional neural network