Real-time automatic detection of gynecological laparoscopic surgical instruments and exploration in surgical skills assessment application: a cross-sectional study.

Abstract

Background: Automatic detection of surgical instruments is essential for Artificial Intelligence Surgery. This study aimed to construct a large-scale dataset of gynecological laparoscopic surgical instruments based on real surgical scenarios, achieve high-precision real-time detection of surgical instruments, and explore their potential application in surgical skill evaluation.

Materials and methods: This cross-sectional study collected 265 gynecological laparoscopic surgical videos from two medical centers for instrument detection. Videos were divided into training and testing sets in a 4:1 ratio, with 161,348 instrument instances extracted. The instruments were detected using Real-Time Models for Object Detection (RTMDet). The mean average precision, sensitivity, and F1 score served as evaluation metrics. External validation was conducted on an independent dataset from a third medical center. Additionally, we further compared the RTMDet with the state-of-the-art PP-YOLOE model on the same dataset. Furthermore, this study performed real-time tracking of instruments during the vaginal cuff suturing step of laparoscopic hysterectomy and compared the differences in kinematic data between proficient and non-proficient videos.

Results: The mean average precision, sensitivity, and F1 score for 9 types of surgical instruments were 91.75%, 94.29%, and 93.00%, respectively. External validation on the independent dataset demonstrated robust performance. In the comparison with PP-YOLOE, RTMDet demonstrated superior performance in all metrics. In the comparative analysis of kinematic data, the proficient group demonstrated significantly lesser path lengths and inter-quartile range, shorter moving times, and higher movement velocities for instruments used by both hands compared to the non-proficient group.

Conclusions: This study established a large-scale, real scenario-based database of gynecological laparoscopic instruments. Using the RTMDet model, high-precision real-time detection and tracking of multiple instruments were achieved. Furthermore, this study identified several instrument kinematic metrics that can be used for surgical skill assessment, providing a reference for the objective quantification of the subjective Global Operative Assessment of Laparoscopic Skills (GOALS).