Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Network with Moment Loss and Positional Encoding for Surgical Phase Recognition

In recent times, many studies concerning surgical video analysis are being conducted due to its growing importance in many medical applications. In particular, it is very important to be able to recognize the current surgical phase because the phase information can be utilized in various ways both during and after surgery. This paper proposes an efficient phase recognition network, called MomentNet, for cholecystectomy endoscopic videos. Unlike LSTM-based network, MomentNet is based on a multi-stage temporal convolutional network. Besides, to improve the phase prediction accuracy, the proposed method adopts a new loss function to supplement the general cross entropy loss function. The new loss function significantly improves the performance of the phase recognition network by constraining un-desirable phase transition and preventing over-segmentation. In addition, MomnetNet effectively applies positional encoding techniques, which are commonly applied in transformer architectures, to the multi-stage temporal convolution network. By using the positional encoding techniques, MomentNet can provide important temporal context, resulting in higher phase prediction accuracy. Furthermore, the MomentNet applies label smoothing technique to suppress overfitting and replaces the backbone network for feature extraction to further improve the network performance. As a result, the MomentNet achieves 92.31% accuracy in the phase recognition task with the Cholec80 dataset, which is 4.55% higher than that of the baseline architecture.