Fast Segmentation of Convex Cyst-like Structures in Gelatin Soft Tissue Phantoms under Ultrasound Imaging with Artifacts and Limited Training Samples

Ultrasound imaging is common for surgical training and development of medical robotics systems. Recent advancements in surgical training often utilize soft-tissue phantoms based on gelatin, with additional objects inserted to represent different, typically fluid-based pathologies. Segmenting these objects from the images is an important step in the development of training and robotic systems. The current study proposes a simple and fast algorithm for segmenting convex cyst-like structures from phantoms under very low training sample scenarios. The algorithm is based on a custom two-step thresholding procedure with additional post-processing with two trainable parameters. Two large phantoms with convex cysts are created and used to train the algorithm and evaluate its performance. The train/test procedure are repeated 60 times with different dataset splits and prove the viability of the solution with only 4 training images. The DICE coefficients were on average at 0.92, while in the best cases exceeded 0.95, all with fast performance in single-thread operation. The algorithm might be useful for development of surgical training systems and medical robotic systems in general.

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1) Opracowanie rekordu ze środków MNiSW, umowa nr SONP/SP/546092/2022 w ramach programu "Społeczna odpowiedzialność nauki" - moduł: Popularyzacja nauki i promocja sportu (2024). 2) Błąd w bibliografii: poz. 5 i 6. stanowią jedno źródło.