Development of Artificial Intelligence for Parathyroid Recognition During Endoscopic Thyroid Surgery

We aimed to establish an artificial intelligence (AI) model to identify parathyroid glands during endoscopic approaches and compare it with senior and junior surgeons' visual estimation.

A total of 1,700 images of parathyroid glands from 166 endoscopic thyroidectomy videos were labeled. Data from 20 additional full-length videos were used as an independent external cohort. The YOLO V3, Faster R-CNN, and Cascade algorithms were used for deep learning, and the optimal algorithm was selected for independent external cohort analysis. Finally, the identification rate, initial recognition time, and tracking periods of PTAIR (Artificial Intelligence model for Parathyroid gland Recognition), junior surgeons, and senior surgeons were compared.

The Faster R-CNN algorithm showed the best balance after optimizing the hyperparameters of each algorithm and was updated as PTAIR. The precision, recall rate, and F1 score of the PTAIR were 88.7%, 92.3%, and 90.5%, respectively. In the independent external cohort, the parathyroid identification rates of PTAIR, senior surgeons, and junior surgeons were 96.9%, 87.5%, and 71.9%, respectively. In addition, PTAIR recognized parathyroid glands 3.83 s ahead of the senior surgeons (p = 0.008), with a tracking period 62.82 s longer than the senior surgeons (p = 0.006).

PTAIR can achieve earlier identification and full-time tracing under a particular training strategy. The identification rate of PTAIR is higher than that of junior surgeons and similar to that of senior surgeons. Such systems may have utility in improving surgical outcomes and also in accelerating the education of junior surgeons.

3 Laryngoscope, 132:2516-2523, 2022.