Zero-Shot Kidney Stone Segmentation Based on Segmentation Anything Model for Robotic-Assisted Endoscope Navigation.

Biomedical robotics has had a significant impact on flexible ureteroscopy (FURS) for the management of nephrolithiasis. The biomedical robots provide a suitable and safe platform for FURS. However, operating the robots expertly still represents a challenge for surgeons. Vision-based navigation is an effective means to simplify the operations of robots by surgeons, which has great potential to improve surgical efficiency. To achieve vision-based navigation, the localization of kidney stones in endoscopic images is the first step. In this paper, we propose a stone segmentation method (SSM) based on zero-shot learning, which consists of segmentation anything model (SAM), an image preprocessing module, and a mask postprocessing module. The SAM segments all objects in endoscopic images, which lack semantic information. The preprocessing module is designed to suppress interference of reflective area in endoscopic images, and the mask postprocessing module is used to filter noise masks. The experimental results on our collected endoscopic images indicate that our method achieves close accuracy on stone segmentation compared with supervised U-Net and VGG_U-Net, which significantly outperforms the Ostu and the SAM.