HeiChole Benchmark (Surgical Workflow and Skill Analysis Challenge (HeiChole Benchmark))

Analyzing the surgical workflow is a prerequisite for many applications in computer assisted surgery (CAS), such as context-aware visualization of navigation information, specifying the most probable tool required next by the surgeon or determining the remaining duration of surgery. Since laparoscopic surgeries are performed using an endoscopic camera, a video stream is always available during surgery, making it the obvious choice as input sensor data for workflow analysis. Moreover, this offers the opportunity for structured assessment of surgical skill for safety, teaching and quality management.

The sub-challenge “Surgical Workflow and Skill Analysis” focuses on the online workflow analysis of laparoscopic surgeries. Participants are challenged to segment laparoscopic surgeries for gallbladder removal (cholecystectomy) into surgical phases, to recognize instrument presence and surgical actions as well as to classify surgical skill based on video data. Participants are encouraged (but not required!) to submit different results for phase segmentation, action recognition, instrument presence and skill classification . This novel kind of challenge investigates the current state-of-the-art results on surgical workflow analysis and skill assessment on one comprehensive dataset.