Semi-Automatic Retrieval of Relevant Segments from Laparoscopic Surgery Videos

Over the last decades, progress in medical technology and imaging technology enabled the technique of minimally invasive surgery. In addition, multimedia technologies allow for retrospective analyses of surgeries. The accumulated videos and images allow for a speed-up in documentation, easier medical case assessment across surgeons, training young surgeons, as well as they find the usage in medical research. Considering a surgery lasting for hours of routine work, surgeons only need to see short video segments of interest to assess a case. Surgeons do not have the time to manually extract video sequences of their surgeries from their big multimedia databases as they do not have the resources for this time-consuming task. The thesis deals with the questions of how to semantically classify video frames using Convolutional Neural Networks into different semantic concepts of surgical actions and anatomical structures. In order to achieve this goal, the capabilities of predefined CNN architectures and transfer learning in the laparoscopic video domain are investigated. The results are expected to improve by domain-specific adaptation of the CNN input layers, i.e. by fusion of the image with motion and relevance information. Finally, the thesis investigates to what extent surgeons' needs are covered with the proposed extraction of relevant scenes.