Real-Time Suture Thread Detection with an Image Classifier

Micro-anastomosis is considered to be a difficult task even for skilled surgeons. Our group has developed a surgical robotic system to assist surgeons. Going further, the detection of surgically relevant objects in the microscopic view is indispensable for the automation or semi-automation of the system. This paper proposes a novel surgical thread detector inspired by an automatic crack detection method. The proposed method achieved a Dice score of 76.30% and an inter-section over union (IOU) of 66.08% at 34.50 fps.