September 4, 2020 Journal article Open Access

Surgical Hand Gesture Prediction for the Operating Room

Inna Skarga-Bandurova; Rostislav Siriak; Tetiana Biloborodova; Fabio Cuzzolin; Vivek Singh Bawa; Mohamed Ibrahim Mohamed; R Dinesh Jackson

Technological advancements in smart assistive technology enable navigating and manipulating various types of computer-aided devices in the operating room through a contactless gesture interface. Understanding surgeon actions is crucial to natural human-robot interaction in operating room since it means a sort of prediction a human behavior so that the robot can foresee the surgeon's intention, early choose appropriate action and reduce waiting time. In this paper, we present a new deep network based on Convolution Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM) for gesture prediction configured to provide natural interaction between the surgeon and assistive robot and improve operating-room efficiency. The experimental results prove the capability of reliably recognizing unfinished gestures on videos. We quantitatively demonstrate the latter ability and the fact that GestureConvLSTM improves the baseline system performance on LSA64 dataset.