Pelphix: Surgical Phase Recognition from X-ray Images in Percutaneous Pelvic Fixation
Surgical phase recognition (SPR) is a crucial element in the digital transformation of the modern operating theater. While SPR based on video sources is well-established, incorporation of interventional X-ray sequences has not yet been explored. This paper presents Pelphix, a first approach to SPR for X-ray-guided percutaneous pelvic fracture fixation, which models the procedure at four levels of granularity – corridor, activity, view, and frame value – simulating the pelvic fracture fixation workflow as a Markov process to provide fully annotated training data. Using added supervision from detection of bony corridors, tools, and anatomy, we learn image representations that are fed into a transformer model to regress surgical phases at the four granularity levels. Our approach demonstrates the feasibility of X-ray-based SPR, achieving an average accuracy of 93.8 in cadaver across all granularity levels, with up to 88 target corridor in real data. This work constitutes the first step toward SPR for the X-ray domain, establishing an approach to categorizing phases in X-ray-guided surgery, simulating realistic image sequences to enable machine learning model development, and demonstrating that this approach is feasible for the analysis of real procedures. As X-ray-based SPR continues to mature, it will benefit procedures in orthopedic surgery, angiography, and interventional radiology by equipping intelligent surgical systems with situational awareness in the operating room.
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