STIR: Surgical Tattoos in Infrared

Quantifying performance of methods for tracking and mapping tissue in endoscopic environments is essential for enabling image guidance and automation of medical interventions and surgery. Datasets developed so far either use rigid environments, visible markers, or require annotators to label salient points in videos after collection. These are respectively: not general, visible to algorithms, or costly and error-prone. We introduce a novel labeling methodology along with a dataset that uses said methodology, Surgical Tattoos in Infrared (STIR). STIR has labels that are persistent but invisible to visible spectrum algorithms. This is done by labelling tissue points with IR-flourescent dye, indocyanine green (ICG). STIR comprises hundreds of stereo video clips in both in vivo and ex vivo scenes with start and end points labelled in the IR spectrum. With over 3,000 labelled points, STIR will help to quantify and enable better analysis of tracking and mapping methods.