Real-time detection of active bleeding in laparoscopic colectomy using artificial intelligence

Abstract

Background: Most intraoperative adverse events (iAEs) result from surgeons' errors, and bleeding is the majority of iAEs. Recognizing active bleeding timely is important to ensure safe surgery, and artificial intelligence (AI) has great potential for detecting active bleeding and providing real-time surgical support. This study aimed to develop a real-time AI model to detect active intraoperative bleeding.

Methods: We extracted 27 surgical videos from a nationwide multi-institutional surgical video database in Japan and divided them at the patient level into three sets: training (n = 21), validation (n = 3), and testing (n = 3). We subsequently extracted the bleeding scenes and labeled distinctively active bleeding and blood pooling frame by frame. We used pre-trained YOLOv7_6w and developed a model to learn both active bleeding and blood pooling. The Average Precision at an Intersection over Union threshold of 0.5 (AP.50) for active bleeding and frames per second (FPS) were quantified. In addition, we conducted two 5-point Likert scales (5 = Excellent, 4 = Good, 3 = Fair, 2 = Poor, and 1 = Fail) questionnaires about sensitivity (the sensitivity score) and number of overdetection areas (the overdetection score) to investigate the surgeons' assessment.

Results: We annotated 34,117 images of 254 bleeding events. The AP.50 for active bleeding in the developed model was 0.574 and the FPS was 48.5. Twenty surgeons answered two questionnaires, indicating a sensitivity score of 4.92 and an overdetection score of 4.62 for the model.

Conclusions: We developed an AI model to detect active bleeding, achieving real-time processing speed. Our AI model can be used to provide real-time surgical support.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Bleeding; Object detection; Surgery.