Automatic Smoke Classification in Endoscopic Video

Abstract

Medical smoke evacuation systems enable proper, filtered removal of toxic fumes during surgery, while stabilizing internal pressure during endoscopic interventions. Typically activated manually, they, however, are prone to inefficient utilization: tardy activation enables smoke to interfere with ongoing surgeries and late deactivation wastes precious resources. In order to address such issues, in this work we demonstrate a vision-based tool indicating endoscopic smoke – a first step towards automatic activation of said systems and avoiding human misconduct. In the back-end we employ a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) model for distinguishing images containing smoke from others.