Surgical smoke removal via residual Swin transformer network

Purpose In robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS), smoke produced by laser ablation and cauterization causes degradation in the visual quality of the operating field, increasing the difficulty and risk of surgery. Therefore, it is important and meaningful to remove fog or smoke from the endoscopic video to maintain a clear visual field. Methods In this paper, we propose a novel method for surgical smoke removal based on the Swin transformer. Our method firstly uses convolutional neural network to extract shallow features, then uses the Swin transformer block to further extract deep features and finally generates smoke-free images. Results We conduct quantitative and qualitative experiments on the proposed method, and we also validate the desmoking results in the surgical instrument segmentation task. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real dataset show that the proposed approach has good performance and outperforms the state-of-the-art surgical smoke removal methods. Conclusion Our method effectively removes surgical smoke, improves image quality and reduces the risk of RMIS. It provides a clearer visual field for the surgeon, as well as for subsequent visual tasks, such as instrument segmentation, 3D scene reconstruction and surgery automation.