Abstract
Needle segmentation is a fundamental step for needle reconstruction and image-guided surgery. Although there has been success stories in needle segmentation for non-microsurgeries, the methods cannot be directly extended to ophthalmic surgery due to the challenges bounded to required spatial resolution. As the ophthalmic surgery is performed by finer and smaller surgical instruments in micro-structural anatomies, specifically in retinal domains, difficulties are raised for delicate operation and sensitive perception. To address these challenges, in this paper we investigate needle segmentation in ophthalmic operation on 60 Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) cubes captured during needle injection surgeries on ex-vivo pig eyes. Furthermore, we developed two different approaches, a conventional method based on morphological features (MF) and a specifically designed full convolution neural networks (FCN) method, moreover, we evaluate them on the benchmark for needle segmentation in the volumetric OCT images. The experimental results show that FCN method has a better segmentation performance based on four evaluation metrics while MF method has a short inference time, which provides valuable reference for future works.
Highlights
Recent research shows that eye pathologies contribute to more than 280 million visual impairments [1]
We propose two methods, corresponding to mechanisms of manually feature exaction and automatically feature exaction, to tackle difficulties for the needle segmentation in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images: (a) with the needle shadow principle [22], a conventional method based on morphological features (MF) comes to the mind; (b) another approach is based on the recently developed fully convolution neural networks (FCN) [23], which has been applied for MRI medical image analysis
We studied the first step of obtaining the needle point cloud for needle pose and position estimation: the needle segmentation in OCT images
Summary
Recent research shows that eye pathologies contribute to more than 280 million visual impairments [1]. The incisions, created by keratome and trocar at the sclera in a circle and 3.5 mm away from the limbus [2], are made to provide the entrance for three tools: light source, surgical tool, and irrigation cannula [3,4]. The light source is used to illuminate the intended area on the retina, allowing the planar view of the area obtained and analyzed by surgeons through the microscope. To address these challenges, the surgical progress proposes a great challenge of delicate operation and sensitive perception to surgeons. The surgical instrument segmentation is the first step to estimate the needle pose and position, which is extremely important to enhance surgeons’
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