A Dual-Stream Architecture for Real-Time Morphological Analysis of Aneurysm in Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery

Real-time and precise morphological analysis of intraoperative AAA is a significant pre-imperative for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS). However, this task is frequently accompanied by the difficulties of ambiguous boundaries and obscured surfaces of aneurysms. To remedy these problems, we propose a Light-Weight Dual-Stream Boundary-Aware Network (DSB-Net) and a novel diagnosis algorithm for real-time morphological analysis of AAA. In the network, the features at the boundaries are preserved by incorporating a boundary localization stream, while the interior segmentation accuracy is guaranteed with a mask prediction stream. Moreover, the diagnosis algorithm is developed to measure the exact size of AAA. Quantitative and qualitative assessments on two different types of datasets illustrate that (1) The presented DSB-Net remarkably outperforms the other previously proposed medical networks with the inference rate of 10.8 FPS, which meets the real-time clinical necessities. (2) The developed algorithm provides accurate size measurements for AAA, which indicates the proposed approach can be integrated into the robotic navigation framework for RMIS.