Video processing to locate the tooltip position in surgical eye-hand coordination tasks.

INTRODUCTION Trajectories of surgical instruments in laparoscopic surgery contain rich information about surgeons' performance. In a simulation environment, instrument trajectories can be taken by motion sensors attached to the instruments. This method is not accepted by surgeons working in the operating room due to safety concerns. In this study, a novel approach of acquiring instrument trajectories from surgical videos is reported. METHODS A total of 12 surgical videos were obtained for this study. The videos were captured during simulated laparoscopic procedures where subjects were required to pick up and transport an object over 3 different targets using a laparoscopic grasper. An algorithm was developed to allow the computer to identify the tip of the grasper on each frame of video, and then compute the trajectories of grasper movement. RESULTS The newly developed algorithm successfully identified tool trajectories from all 12 surgical videos. To validate the accuracy of this algorithm, the location of the tooltip in these videos were also manually labeled. The rate of accurate matching between these 2 methods was 98.4% of all video frames. DISCUSSION Identifying tool movement from surgical videos creates an effective way to track instrument trajectories. This builds up the foundation for assessing psychomotor performance of surgeons in the operating room without jeopardizing patient safety.