Accurate Segmentation and Tracking of Chorda Tympani in Endoscopic Middle Ear Surgery with Artificial Intelligence.

Objective

We introduce a novel endoscopic middle ear surgery dataset specifically designed for evaluating deep learning (DL)-based semantic segmentation of chorda tympani.

Methods

We curated a dataset comprising 8240 images from 25 patients, divided into a training set (20%, 1648 images), validation set (5%, 412 images), and test set (75%, 6180 images). We employed data enhancement techniques to expand the picture size of the training and validation sets by 5 times (training set: 8240 images, verification set: 2060 images). Subsequently, we employed a multistage transfer learning training method to establish, train, and validate various convolutional neural networks.

Results

On the validation set of 2060 labeled images, our proposed network achieved good results, with the U-net exhibiting the highest effectiveness (mIOU = 0.8737, mPA = 0.9263). Furthermore, when applied to the test dataset of 6180 raw images and contrasted with the prediction of otologists, the overall performance of the U-net was excellent (accuracy = 0.911, precision = 0.9823, sensitivity = 0.8777, specificity = 0.9714).

Conclusions

Our findings demonstrate that DL can be successfully employed for automatic segmentation of chorda tympani in endoscopic middle ear surgery, yielding high-performance results. This study validates the potential feasibility of future intelligent navigation technologies to assist in endoscopic middle ear surgery.