ST(OR)$^2$: Spatio-Temporal Object Level Reasoning for Activity Recognition in the Operating Room

Idris Hamoud, Muhammad Abdullah Jamal, Vinkle Srivastav, Didier MUTTER, Nicolas Padoy, Omid Mohareri

Keywords: OR Workflow Analysis, OR Surgical Activity Recognition, Object Level Reasoning, Human-object interaction

TL;DR: This work proposes a novel surgical activity recognition approach that exploits object-level dynamics. We show superior performance on sample-efficiency experiments for for all data regimes.

Abstract:

Surgical robotics holds much promise for improving patient safety and clinician experience in the Operating Room (OR). However, it also comes with new challenges, requiring strong team coordination and effective OR management. Automatic detection of surgical
activities is a key requirement for developing AI-based intelligent tools to tackle these challenges. The current state-of-the-art surgical activity recognition methods however operate on image-based representations and depend on large-scale labeled datasets whose collection is time-consuming and resource-expensive. This work proposes a new sample-efficient and object-based approach for surgical activity recognition in the OR. Our method focuses on the geometric arrangements between clinicians and surgical devices, thus utilizing the significant object interaction dynamics in the OR. We conduct experiments in a low-data regime study for long video activity recognition. We also benchmark our method against other object-centric approaches on clip-level action classification and show superior performance.