shrinking-data-for-surgical-training

For this research, MGH surgeons identified seven distinct stages in a procedure for removing part of the stomach, and the researchers tagged the beginnings of each stage in eight laparoscopic videos. "We wanted to see how this system works for relatively small training sets," Rosman explains. "If you're in a specific hospital, and you're interested in a specific surgery type, or even more important, a specific variant of a surgery -- all the surgeries where this or that happened -- you may not have a lot of examples." In this case, the system had to learn to identify similarities between frames of video in separate laparoscopic feeds that denoted the same phases of a surgical procedure.