Classification of Operation Phases in Cataract Surgery Videos

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Our paper has been accepted for publication and oral presentation at MMM 2018 conference:

Title: Frame-Based Classification of Operation Phases in Cataract Surgery Videos

Authors: Manfred Jürgen Primus, Doris Putzgruber-Adamitsch, Mario Taschwer, Bernd Muenzer, Yosuf El-Shabrawi, Laszlo Boeszoermenyi and Klaus Schöffmann

Abstract: Cataract surgeries are frequently performed to correct a lens opacification of the human eye, which usually appears in the course of aging. These surgeries are conducted with the help of a microscope and are typically recorded on video for later inspection and educational purposes. However, post-hoc visual analysis of video recordings is cumbersome and time-consuming for surgeons if there is no navigation support, such as bookmarks to specific operation phases. To prepare the way for an automatic detection of operation phases in cataract surgery videos, we investigate the effectiveness of a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically assign video frames to operation phases, which can be regarded as a single-label multi-class classification problem. In absence of public datasets of cataract surgery videos, we provide a dataset of 21 videos of standardized cataract surgeries and use it to train and evaluate our CNN classifier. Experimental results display a mean F1-score of about 68% for frame-based operation phase classification, which can be further improved to 75% when considering temporal information of video frames in the CNN architecture.

Dataset: http://www.itec.aau.at/ftp/datasets/ovid/cat-21/

Preprint PDF
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73603-7_20

Bibtex:

@InProceedings{Primus2018,
  Title                    = {Frame-Based Classification of Operation Phases in Cataract Surgery Videos},
  Author                   = {Primus, Manfred J{\"u}ergen and Putzgruber-Adamitsch, Doris and Taschwer, Mario and M{\"u}nzer, Bernd and El-Shabrawi, Yosuf and B{\"o}sz{\"o}rmenyi, Laszlo and Schoeffmann, Klaus},
  Booktitle                = {MultiMedia Modeling},
  Year                     = {2018},

  Address                  = {Cham},
  Editor                   = {Schoeffmann, Klaus and Chalidabhongse, Thanarat H. and Ngo, Chong Wah and Aramvith, Supavadee and O'Connor, Noel E. and Ho, Yo-Sung and Gabbouj, Moncef and Elgammal, Ahmed},
  Pages                    = {241--253},
  Publisher                = {Springer International Publishing},
  ISBN                     = {978-3-319-73603-7}
}

Courses in winter term 2017

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In the upcoming winter term (starting on October 2), I will give the following courses at AAU:

  • 620.005 UE Introduction to Computer Science (Part 1, German)
  • 620.025 UE Introduction to Computer Science (Part 2, German)
  • 621.703 PR Computer Organization (German)

Access to course material in Moodle is restricted to enrolled students, but can also be requested from me by e-mail.

PhD thesis submitted

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My PhD thesis has been submitted on April 6 and graded as excellent (grade 1).

Title of thesis: Concept-Based and Multimodal Methods for Medical Case Retrieval

Abstract:
Medical case retrieval (MCR) is defined as a multimedia retrieval problem, where the document collection consists of medical case descriptions that pertain to particular diseases, patients’ histories, or other entities of biomedical knowledge. Case descriptions are multimedia documents containing textual and visual modalities (images). A query may consist of a textual description of patient’s symptoms and related diagnostic images. This thesis proposes and evaluates methods that aim at improving MCR effectiveness over the baseline of fulltext retrieval. We hypothesize that this objective can be achieved by utilizing controlled vocabularies of biomedical concepts for query expansion and concept-based retrieval. The latter represents case descriptions and queries as vectors of biomedical concepts, which may be generated automatically from textual and/or visual modalities by concept mapping algorithms. We propose a multimodal retrieval framework for MCR by late fusion of text-based retrieval (including query expansion) and concept-based retrieval and show that retrieval effectiveness can be improved by 49% using linear fusion of practical component retrieval systems. The potential of further improvement is experimentally estimated as a 166% increase of effectiveness over fulltext retrieval using query-adaptive fusion of ideal component retrieval systems. Additional contributions of this thesis include the proposal and comparative evaluation of methods for concept mapping, query and document expansion, and automatic classification and separation of compound figures found in case descriptions.

Keywords: multimedia information retrieval / biomedical information retrieval / biomedical concept detection / information fusion / image processing

Bibtex citation:

@PhdThesis{Taschwer2017,
Title                    = {Concept-Based and Multimodal Methods for Medical Case Retrieval},
Author                   = {Taschwer, Mario W.},
School                   = {Alpen-Adria-Universit{\"a}t Klagenfurt},
Year                     = {2017},
Address                  = {Austria},
Month                    = mar,
Url                      = {http://www.itec.aau.at/bib/files/phd-thesis-taschwer.pdf}
}

Courses in summer term 2017

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In the upcoming summer term (starting on March 1), I will give the following courses at AAU:

  • 620.002 Introduction to Computer Science (Exercises, German)
  • 621.401 Compiler Construction (Lab, English)

Courses in winter term 2016

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Here are the courses I give this winter term, starting on October 3:

621.702 Computer organization (lab)
621.704 Computer organization (lab)

Students access the course material through non-public Moodle. If you are not enrolled to these courses but are interested in the course material (available in German only), please drop me an e-mail.

Compound Figure Separation Journal Paper

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We submitted extended work on compound figure separation to the MTAP Journal.

Update: The revised version of our paper has been accepted for publication on Dec 1, 2016 and published online on Dec 29, 2016. The printed version appeared in January, 2018.

Title: Automatic Separation of Compound Figures in Scientific Articles

Abstract:
Content-based analysis and retrieval of digital images found in scientific articles is often hindered by images consisting of multiple subfigures (compound figures). We address this problem by proposing a method (ComFig) to automatically classify and separate compound figures, which consists of two main steps: (i) a supervised compound figure classifier (ComFig classifier) discriminates between compound and non-compound figures using task-specific image features; and (ii) an image processing algorithm is applied to predicted compound images to perform compound figure separation (ComFig separation). The proposed ComFig classifier is shown to achieve state-of-the-art classification performance on a published dataset. Our ComFig separation algorithm shows superior separation accuracy on two different datasets compared to other known automatic approaches. Finally, we propose a method to evaluate the effectiveness of the ComFig chain combining classifier and separation algorithm, and use it to optimize the misclassification loss of the ComFig classifier for maximal effectiveness in the chain.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-4237-x

Bibtex citation:

@Article{Taschwer2018,
  Title                    = {Automatic separation of compound figures in scientific articles},
  Author                   = {Taschwer, Mario and Marques, Oge},
  Journal                  = {Multimedia Tools and Applications},
  Year                     = {2018},
  Month                    = {Jan},
  Number                   = {1},
  Pages                    = {519--548},
  Volume                   = {77},
  Doi                      = {10.1007/s11042-016-4237-x},
  ISSN                     = {1573-7721}
}

Courses in summer term 2016

Posted on .

In the upcoming summer term (starting on March 1, 2016), I will give the following two courses:

  • 620.002 Introduction to computer science (exercises, German)
  • 621.401 Compiler construction (lab, English)

Course material will be provided for students in non-public Moodle. If you are not enrolled to these courses and interested in the course material, please drop me an e-mail.

Courses in winter term 2015

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Here are the courses I give this winter term, starting this week:

620.005 Introduction to computer science (exercises)
621.704 Computer organization (lab)

Students access the course material through non-public Moodle. If you are not enrolled to these courses but are interested in the course material (available in German only), please drop me an e-mail.

Compound Figure Separation at MMM 2016

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Our extended work on compound figure separation has been accepted as a regular paper at MMM 2016 conference. A preprint is available here.

Update: Slides of my presentation on Jan 5, 2016 at MMM conference. Official link to published paper. BibTeX citation:

@InCollection{Taschwer2016,
Title                    = {Compound Figure Separation Combining Edge and Band Separator Detection},
Author                   = {Taschwer, Mario and Marques, Oge},
Booktitle                = {MultiMedia Modeling},
Publisher                = {Springer International Publishing},
Year                     = {2016},
Editor                   = {Tian, Qi and Sebe, Nicu and Qi, Guo-Jun and Huet, Benoit and Hong, Richang and Liu, Xueliang},
Pages                    = {162--173},
Series                   = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
Volume                   = {9516},

Doi                      = {10.1007/978-3-319-27671-7_14},
ISBN                     = {978-3-319-27670-0}
}

Abstract:
We propose an image processing algorithm to automatically separate compound figures appearing in scientific articles. We classify compound images into two classes and apply different algorithms for detecting vertical and horizontal separators to each class: the edge-based algorithm aims at detecting visible edges between subfigures, whereas the band-based algorithm tries to detect whitespace separating subfigures (separator bands). The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on two recent datasets for compound figure separation (CFS) in the biomedical domain and achieves a slightly better detection accuracy than state-of-the-art approaches. Conducted experiments investigate CFS effectiveness and classification accuracy of various classifier implementations.