Sano PhD students won one of the challenges of MICCAI 2023 

Joanna Kaleta and Szymon Płotka, PhD students at the Health Informatics team of Sano took part in the MICCAI 2023 Challenge of Workflow Recognition in Endoscopic Pituitary Surgery (part of EndoVis Challenge) and won it in the category of “Multi-class instrument recognition”.

Congratulations to the winners! 

The “gold standard” treatment for pituitary gland tumours is endoscopic pituitary surgery, where the tumour is directly removed by entering through a nostril. This surgery is particularly challenging due to the small working space which limits both vision and instrument manoeuvrability and thus can lead to poor surgical technique causing adverse outcomes for the patient. 

Computer-assisted intervention can help to overcome these challenges. Among other tasks, the recognition of instruments is important to help with decision-making during surgery. Technically, in the challenge, it was a multi-class, multi-label classification task for each frame in the videos, with the possibility of each frame containing from zero to two medical instruments. 

The annual MICCAI conference attracts the world’s leading biomedical scientists, engineers, and clinicians from a wide range of disciplines associated with medical imaging and computer assisted intervention. MICCAI 2023, the 26th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention is ongoing now in Vancouver Convention Centre, Canada.  

More about the challenge: http://opencas.dkfz.de/endovis/challenges/2023/