The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

One of the recent advances in surgical AI is the recognition of surgical activities as triplets of (instrument, verb, target). Albeit providing detailed information for computer-assisted intervention, current triplet recognition approaches rely only on single frame features. Exploiting the temporal cues from earlier frames would improve the recognition of surgical action triplets from videos. In this paper, we propose Rendezvous in Time (RiT) - a deep learning model that extends the state-of-the-art model, Rendezvous, with temporal modeling. Focusing more on the verbs, our RiT explores the connectedness of current and past frames to learn temporal attention-based features for enhanced triplet recognition. We validate our proposal on the challenging surgical triplet dataset, CholecT45, demonstrating an improved recognition of the verb and triplet along with other interactions involving the verb such as (instrument, verb). Qualitative results show that the RiT produces smoother predictions for most triplet instances than the state-of-the-arts. We present a novel attention-based approach that leverages the temporal fusion of video frames to model the evolution of surgical actions and exploit their benefits for surgical triplet recognition.

近年来，随着深度神经网络方法的普及，手术计算机视觉领域经历了相当大的突破。但是，用于培训的标准全面监督方法需要大量的带注释的数据，从而实现高昂的成本；特别是在临床领域。已经开始在一般计算机视觉社区中获得吸引力的自我监督学习（SSL）方法代表了对这些注释成本的潜在解决方案，从而使仅从未标记的数据中学习有用的表示形式。尽管如此，SSL方法在更复杂和有影响力的领域（例如医学和手术）中的有效性仍然有限且未开发。在这项工作中，我们通过在手术计算机视觉的背景下研究了四种最先进的SSL方法（Moco V2，Simclr，Dino，SWAV），以解决这一关键需求。我们对这些方法在cholec80数据集上的性能进行了广泛的分析，以在手术环境理解，相位识别和工具存在检测中为两个基本和流行的任务。我们检查了它们的参数化，然后在半监督设置中相对于训练数据数量的行为。如本工作所述和进行的那样，将这些方法的正确转移到手术中，可以使SSL的一般用途获得可观的性能 - 相位识别率高达7％，而在工具存在检测方面，则具有20％ - 半监督相位识别方法高达14％。该代码将在https://github.com/camma-public/selfsupsurg上提供。

Context-aware decision support in the operating room can foster surgical safety and efficiency by leveraging real-time feedback from surgical workflow analysis. Most existing works recognize surgical activities at a coarse-grained level, such as phases, steps or events, leaving out fine-grained interaction details about the surgical activity; yet those are needed for more helpful AI assistance in the operating room. Recognizing surgical actions as triplets of <instrument, verb, target> combination delivers comprehensive details about the activities taking place in surgical videos. This paper presents CholecTriplet2021: an endoscopic vision challenge organized at MICCAI 2021 for the recognition of surgical action triplets in laparoscopic videos. The challenge granted private access to the large-scale CholecT50 dataset, which is annotated with action triplet information. In this paper, we present the challenge setup and assessment of the state-of-the-art deep learning methods proposed by the participants during the challenge. A total of 4 baseline methods from the challenge organizers and 19 new deep learning algorithms by competing teams are presented to recognize surgical action triplets directly from surgical videos, achieving mean average precision (mAP) ranging from 4.2% to 38.1%. This study also analyzes the significance of the results obtained by the presented approaches, performs a thorough methodological comparison between them, in-depth result analysis, and proposes a novel ensemble method for enhanced recognition. Our analysis shows that surgical workflow analysis is not yet solved, and also highlights interesting directions for future research on fine-grained surgical activity recognition which is of utmost importance for the development of AI in surgery.