DL-based segmentation of endoscopic scenes for mitral valve repair

Minimally invasive surgery is increasingly utilized for mitral valve repair and replacement. The intervention is performed with an endoscopic field of view on the arrested heart. Extracting the necessary information from the live endoscopic video stream is challenging due to the moving camera position, the high variability of defects, and occlusion of structures by instruments. During such minimally invasive interventions there is no time to segment regions of interest manually. We propose a real-time-capable deep-learning-based approach to detect and segment the relevant anatomical structures and instruments. For the universal deployment of the proposed solution, we evaluate them on pixel accuracy as well as distance measurements of the detected contours. The U-Net, Google's DeepLab v3, and the Obelisk-Net models are cross-validated, with DeepLab showing superior results in pixel accuracy and distance measurements.