Surgical Phase and Instrument Recognition: How to identify appropriate Dataset Splits
Purpose: The development of machine learning models for surgical workflow and
instrument recognition from temporal data represents a challenging task due to
the complex nature of surgical workflows. In particular, the imbalanced
distribution of data is one of the major challenges in the domain of surgical
workflow recognition. In order to obtain meaningful results, careful
partitioning of data into training, validation, and test sets, as well as the
selection of suitable evaluation metrics are crucial. Methods: In this work, we
present an openly available web-based application that enables interactive
exploration of dataset partitions. The proposed visual framework facilitates
the assessment of dataset splits for surgical workflow recognition, especially
with regard to identifying sub-optimal dataset splits. Currently, it supports
visualization of surgical phase and instrument annotations. Results: In order
to validate the dedicated interactive visualizations, we use a dataset split of
the Cholec80 dataset. This dataset split was specifically selected to reflect a
case of strong data imbalance. Using our software, we were able to identify
phases, phase transitions, and combinations of surgical instruments that were
not represented in one of the sets. Conclusion: In order to obtain meaningful
results in highly unbalanced class distributions, special care should be taken
with respect to the selection of an appropriate split. Interactive data
visualization represents a promising approach for the assessment of machine
learning datasets. The source code is available at
https://github.com/Cardio-AI/endovis-ml