Surgical tool segmentation is used for detection, tracking and pose estimation of the tools in the vicinity of surgical scenes. It is considered as an essential task in surgical phase recognition and flow identification. Surgical flow identification is an unresolved task in the domain of context-aware surgical systems, which is used extensively on computer assisted intervention (CAI). CAI is used for staff assignment, automated guidance during intervention, surgical alert systems, automatic indexing of surgical video databases and optimisation of the real-time scheduling of operating room. Semantic segmentation is used for accurate delineation of surgical tools from the background. In semantic segmentation, each label is assigned to a class as a tool or a background. In this presented work, we applied a hybrid method utilising both recurrent and convolutional networks to achieve higher accuracy of surgical tools segmentation. The proposed method is trained and tested using a public dataset MICCAI 2016 Endoscopic Vision Challenge Robotic Instruments dataset "EndoVis". We achieved better performance using the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art methods on the same dataset for benchmarking. We achieved a balanced accuracy of 93.3% and Jaccard index of 82.7%.

Skin melanoma is one of the highly addressed health problems in many countries. Dermatologists diagnose melanoma by visual inspections of mole using clinical assessment tools such as ABCD. However, computer vision tools have been introduced to assist in quantitative analysis of skin lesions. Deep learning is one of the trending machine learning techniques that have been successfully utilized to solve many difficult computer vision tasks. We proposed using a hybrid method that utilizes two popular deep learning methods: convolutional and recurrent neural networks. The proposed method was trained using 900 images and tested on 375 images. Images were obtained from “Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection” challenge which was hosted by ISBI 2016 conference. We achieved segmentation average accuracy of 0.98 and Jaccard index of 0.93. Results were compared with other state-of-the-art methods, including winner of ISBI 2016 challenge for skin melanoma segmentation, along with the same evaluation criteria.