FASL-Seg: Anatomy and Tool Segmentation of Surgical Scenes

Abstract: The growing popularity of robotic minimally invasive surgeries has made deep learning-based surgical training a key area of research. A thorough understanding of the surgical scene components is crucial, which semantic segmentation models can help achieve. However, most existing work focuses on surgical tools and overlooks anatomical objects. Additionally, current state-of-the-art (SOTA) models struggle to balance capturing high-level contextual features and low-level edge features. We propose a Feature-Adaptive Spatial Localization model (FASL-Seg), designed to capture features at multiple levels of detail through two distinct processing streams, namely a Low-Level Feature Projection (LLFP) and a High-Level Feature Projection (HLFP) stream, for varying feature resolutions - enabling precise segmentation of anatomy and surgical instruments. We evaluated FASL-Seg on surgical segmentation benchmark datasets EndoVis18 and EndoVis17 on three use cases. The FASL-Seg model achieves a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 72.71% on parts and anatomy segmentation in EndoVis18, improving on SOTA by 5%. It further achieves a mIoU of 85.61% and 72.78% in EndoVis18 and EndoVis17 tool type segmentation, respectively, outperforming SOTA overall performance, with comparable per-class SOTA results in both datasets and consistent performance in various classes for anatomy and instruments, demonstrating the effectiveness of distinct processing streams for varying feature resolutions.