Surgical workflow recognition has numerous potential medical applications, such as the automatic indexing of surgical video databases and the optimization of real-time OR scheduling, among others. As a result, phase recognition has been studied in the context of several kinds of surgeries, such as cataract, neurological, and laparoscopic surgeries. In the literature, two types of features are typically used to perform this task: visual features and tool usage signals. However, the visual features used are mostly handcrafted. Furthermore, since additional equipment is needed to obtain the tool usage signals automatically, they are usually collected via a tedious manual annotation process. In this paper, we propose a novel method for phase recognition that uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically learn features from cholecystectomy videos and that relies uniquely on visual information. In previous studies, it has been shown that the tool signals can provide valuable information in performing the phase recognition task. Thus, we present a novel CNN architecture, called EndoNet, that is designed to carry out the phase recognition and tool presence detection tasks in a multi-task manner. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work proposing to use a CNN for multiple recognition tasks on laparoscopic videos. Extensive experimental comparisons to other methods show that EndoNet yields state-of-the-art results for both tasks.

本研究提出了一种新的方法，使用卷积神经网络从胆囊切除术视频中自动学习特征，以完成手术阶段识别和工具存在检测等多任务学习，该方法取得了最好的效果。

EndoNet: 深度网络结构用于腹腔镜视频识别任务