Real-time identification of blood regions for hemostasis support in laparoscopic surgery

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.

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