Identifying an anatomical landmark
The White Line of Toldt is an important landmark in colorectal surgery. Its appearance can be difficult to distinguish in laparoscopic images because of complex tissue structures and low contrast.
This collaborative study introduced the LTS dataset of 1,715 annotated images from 145 patients with colorectal cancer. FSA-Net uses fractal information to guide local texture modelling and attention to anatomical relationships.
Evidence and research scope
In offline segmentation evaluation on the LTS test set, FSA-Net achieved a Dice score of 0.557 and IoU of 0.428, compared with 0.533 and 0.405 for Swin-UMamba. Additional tests examined transfer to polyp segmentation benchmarks.
The contribution is an anatomical dataset and a method for surgical visual perception. This provides a starting point for research on visual assistance; integration into real-time navigation and evaluation during surgery are further steps.
Feng Gao contributed as a co-author. The study was published at MICCAI 2025.