Eye-gaze driven surgical workflow segmentation

Abstract

In today's climate of clinical governance there is growing pressure on surgeons to demonstrate their competence, improve standards and reduce surgical errors. This paper presents a study on developing a novel eye-gaze driven technique for surgical assessment and workflow recovery. The proposed technique investigates the use of a Parallel Layer Perceptor (PLP) to automate the recognition of a key surgical step in a porcine laparoscopic cholecystectomy model. The classifier is eye-gaze contingent but combined with image based visual feature detection for improved system performance. Experimental results show that by fusing image instrument likelihood measures, an overall classification accuracy of 75% is achieved. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.