# Video-based surgical skill assessment using 3D convolutional neural networks

## TL;DR

This paper presents a deep learning approach using 3D convolutional neural networks to automatically assess surgical skills from video data alone, eliminating the need for additional tracking equipment.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel video-based surgical skill assessment method leveraging 3D ConvNets, demonstrating high accuracy on a public dataset without manual feature engineering.

## Key findings

- Achieved skill classification accuracy from 95.1% to 100%.
- Demonstrated feasibility of video-only automatic skill assessment.
- Learned meaningful patterns directly from surgical videos.

## Abstract

Purpose: A profound education of novice surgeons is crucial to ensure that surgical interventions are effective and safe. One important aspect is the teaching of technical skills for minimally invasive or robot-assisted procedures. This includes the objective and preferably automatic assessment of surgical skill. Recent studies presented good results for automatic, objective skill evaluation by collecting and analyzing motion data such as trajectories of surgical instruments. However, obtaining the motion data generally requires additional equipment for instrument tracking or the availability of a robotic surgery system to capture kinematic data. In contrast, we investigate a method for automatic, objective skill assessment that requires video data only. This has the advantage that video can be collected effortlessly during minimally invasive and robot-assisted training scenarios. Methods: Our method builds on recent advances in deep learning-based video classification. Specifically, we propose to use an inflated 3D ConvNet to classify snippets, i.e., stacks of a few consecutive frames, extracted from surgical video. The network is extended into a Temporal Segment Network during training. Results: We evaluate the method on the publicly available JIGSAWS dataset, which consists of recordings of basic robot-assisted surgery tasks performed on a dry lab bench-top model. Our approach achieves high skill classification accuracies ranging from 95.1% to 100.0%. Conclusions: Our results demonstrate the feasibility of deep learning-based assessment of technical skill from surgical video. Notably, the 3D ConvNet is able to learn meaningful patterns directly from the data, alleviating the need for manual feature engineering. Further evaluation will require more annotated data for training and testing.