A comparative analysis of multi-backbone Mask R-CNN for surgical tools detection

Real-time surgical tool segmentation and tracking based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) has gained increasing interest in the field of mini-invasive surgery. In fact, the application of this novel artificial vision technologies allows both to reduce surgical risks and to increase patient safety. Moreover, these types of models can be used both to track the tools and detect markers or external artefacts in a real-time video stream. Multiple object detection and instance segmentation can be addressed efficiently by leveraging region-based CNN models. Thus, this work provides a comparison among state-of-the-art multi-backbone Mask R-CNNs to solve these tasks. Moreover, we show that such models can serve as a basis for tracking algorithms. The models were trained and tested with a data-set of 4955 manually annotated images, validated by 3 experts in the field. We tested 12 different combinations of CNN backbones and training hyperparameters. The results show that it is possible to employ a modern CNN to tackle the surgical tool detection problem, with the best-performing Mask R-CNN configuration achieving 87% Average Precision (AP) at Intersection over Union (IOU) 0.5.