Part of EndoVis Challenge

Surgical microscopes or endoscopes are commonly used to observe the anatomy of the organs in surgeries. Analyzing the video signals issued from these tools are evolving as techniques needed to empower computer-assisted interventions (CAI). A fundamental building block to such capabilities is the ability to automatically understand what the surgeons are performing throughout the surgery. In other words, recognizing the surgical activities being performed by the surgeon can be deemed as an essential steps toward CAI. The main motivation for these tasks is to design efficient solutions for surgical workflow analysis, with potential applications in post-operative analysis of the surgical intervention, surgical training and real-time decision support. Our application domain is cataract surgery. As a challenge, our aim is to provide a formal framework for evaluating new and  current state-of-the-art methods and gather researchers in the field of surgical workflow analysis.

In 2017 and 2018, we organized two challenges on surgical tool detection in cataract surgery videos. The task was to detect to the tools being used by the surgeons during the surgery in two types of video streams. In this edition, the task is to recognize the activities done by the surgeons throughout the surgery. This edition of CATARACTS is organized as a sub-challenge of the MICCAI 2020 EndoVis challenge (Link to be provided). For more details about the challenge, please see our Synapse Website. Please note that the submissions are now closed.