Abstract
Laparoscopic surgery allows reduction in surgical incision size and leads to faster recovery compared with open surgery. When bleeding takes place, hemostasis treatment is planned according to the state and location of the bleeding. However, it is difficult to find the bleeding source due to low visibility caused by the narrow field of view of the laparoscope. In this paper, we propose the concept of a hemostasis support system that automatically identifies blood regions and indicates them to the surgeon. We mainly describe a blood region identification method that is one of technical challenges to realize the support system. The proposed method is based on a machine learning technique called the support vector machine, working in real time. Within this method, all the pixels in the image are classified as either blood or non-blood pixels based on color features (e.g., a combination of RGB and HSV values). The suitable combination of feature values used for the classification is determined by a simple feature selection method. Three feature values were determined to identify the blood region. We then validated the proposed method with ten sequences of laparoscopic images by cross-validation. The average accuracy exceeded 95% with a processing time of about 12.6 ms/frame. The proposed method was able to accurately identify blood regions and was suitable for real-time applications.
Highlights
Minimally invasive treatments have been much in demand as medical technology develops
Laparoscopic surgery can lead to faster recovery compared with open surgery
We examine the feature values suitable for laparoscopic images and classify the pixels into either blood or nonblood pixels by employing a support vector machine (SVM)
Summary
Minimally invasive treatments have been much in demand as medical technology develops. Laparoscopic surgery has attracted a lot of attention because it requires tiny incisions (5–30 mm) to insert a laparoscope and other instruments instead of a large incision (about 300 mm) for open surgery. In the event of bleeding, surgeons rapidly cover the bleeding area with gauzes as primary hemostasis. Primary hemostasis is just an emergency action. Complete hemostasis such as heat coagulation, suture and ligation must be conducted after primary hemostasis. Surgeons plan their treatment for bleeding according to the bleeding status and the location. It is difficult to identify them and to implement the secondary hemostasis smoothly because the bleeding area is covered with gauzes after primary hemostasis. Laparoscopic surgery requires close monitoring of the bleeding state and location
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