Abstract
Surgical task automation is expected to improve the performance of robotic surgery. Although segmentation of surgical threads in laparoscopic images is one of prerequisites for surgical task automation, the surgical thread segmentation in an unstructured environment is a very challenging problem. This study aims to develop a scheme for surgical thread segmentation for surgical task automation. We propose a segmentation algorithm wherein the continuity of a thread is utilized using the Kalman filter. Once a user clicks one point of the surgical thread in the image, the system traces the thread from the clicked point and segments the rest of the thread automatically. The algorithm was tested using the images of the thread in both structured and unstructured environments.
