Towards more efficient CNN-based surgical tools classification using transfer learning

Context-aware system (CAS) is a system that can understand the context of a given situation and either share this context with other systems for their response or respond by itself. In surgery, these systems are intended to assist surgeons enhance the scheduling productivity of operating rooms (OR) and surgical teams, and promote a comprehensive perception and consciousness of the OR. Furthermore, the automated surgical tool classification in medical images is a real-time computerized assistance to the surgeons in conducting different operations. Moreover, deep learning has embroiled in every facet of life due to the availability of large datasets and the emergence of convolutional neural networks (CNN) that have paved the way for the development of different image related processes. The aim of this paper is to resolve the problem of unbalanced data in the publicly available Cholec80 laparoscopy video dataset, using multiple data augmentation techniques. Furthermore, we implement a fine-tuned CNN to tackle the automatic tool detection during a surgery, with prospective use in the teaching field, evaluating surgeons, and surgical quality assessment (SQA). The proposed method is evaluated on a dataset of 80 cholecystectomy videos (Cholec80 dataset). A mean average precision of 93.75% demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method, outperforming the other models significantly.