Transfer learning for anatomical structure segmentation in otorhinolaryngology microsurgery.

[BACKGROUND] Reducing the annotation burden is an active and meaningful area of artificial intelligence (AI) research.

[METHODS] Multiple datasets for the segmentation of two landmarks were constructed based on 41 257 labelled images and 6 different microsurgical scenarios. These datasets were trained using the multi-stage transfer learning (TL) methodology.

[RESULTS] The multi-stage TL enhanced segmentation performance over baseline (mIOU 0.6892 vs. 0.8869). Besides, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieved a robust performance (mIOU 0.8917 vs. 0.8603) even when the training dataset size was reduced from 90% (30 078 images) to 10% (3342 images). When directly applying the weight from one certain surgical scenario to recognise the same target in images of other scenarios without training, CNNs still obtained an optimal mIOU of 0.6190 ± 0.0789.

[CONCLUSIONS] Model performance can be improved with TL in datasets with reduced size and increased complexity. It is feasible for data-based domain adaptation among different microsurgical fields.