Recognition of Endovascular Manipulations using Recurrent Neural Networks.

The ability to accurately recognize elementary surgical gestures is a stepping stone to automated surgical assessment and surgical training. In this paper, a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network is applied to the task of recognizing six typical manipulations in percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). The manipulation mentioned above is referring to the atomic surgical operation, also called surgeme in many research. Instead of using the video data or kinematic data of surgical instruments, we propose to use the kinematic data of the operator's hand acquired by our wearable data glove to recognize the manipulations. To establish a baseline for comparison, a method based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is applied because HMM is frequently used in the tasks of surgical sequence learning. Two cross-validation schemes are used in our experiments, they both illustrate that our LSTM-based method far outperforms the HMM-based method. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to apply the LSTM recurrent neural network in the field of PCI.