Hyperspectral imaging for orthopedic surgery: lightweight AI enables real-time bone and cartilage segmentation
摘要
Accurate intraoperative identification of bone and cartilage is critical for orthopedic surgery, particularly during joint replacement procedures. Current approaches rely on direct visual inspection, which may be compromised by limited visibility or tissue deformation. This study represents the first investigation of hyperspectral imaging (HSI) for orthopedic surgery, assessing its potential for real-time intraoperative tissue segmentation when combined with lightweight artificial intelligence (AI) models, evaluated offline on in vivo porcine data. We leveraged the publicly available HeiPorSPECTRAL dataset, selecting Bone, Cartilage, and an (Others) class as representative orthopedic tissues. Pixel-based (multilayer perceptron (MLP), one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN)) and patch-based (two-/three-dimensional U-Net (2D/3D U-Net)) models were systematically compared, with and without spectral normalization. Performance was assessed using accuracy, Dice similarity coefficient, and inference time. Normalization degraded performance across all models. The MLP achieved the best trade-off between accuracy (97.03%) and computational efficiency, segmenting a full hyperspectral cube in