PitVQA: A Dataset of Visual Question Answering in Pituitary Surgery

PitVQA dataset comprises 25 videos of endoscopic pituitary surgeries from the National Hospital of Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, United Kingdom, similar to the dataset used in the MICCAI PitVis challenge. All patients provided informed consent, and the study was registered with the local governance committee. The surgeries were recorded using a high-definition endoscope (Karl Storz Endoscopy) with a resolution of 720p and stored as MP4 files. All videos were annotated for the surgical phases, steps, instruments present and operation notes guided by a standardised annotation framework, which was derived from a preceding international consensus study on pituitary surgery workflow. Annotation was performed collaboratively by 2 neurosurgical residents with operative pituitary experience and checked by an attending neurosurgeon. We extracted image frames from each video at 1 fps and removed any frames that were blurred or occluded. Ultimately, we obtained a total of 109,173 frames, with the videos of minimum and maximum length yielding 2,443 and 7,179 frames, respectively. We acquired frame-wise question-answer pairs for all the categories of the annotation. Overall, there are 884,242 question-answer pairs from 109,173 frames, which is around 8 pairs for each frame. There are 59 classes overall, including 4 phases, 15 steps, 18 instruments, 3 variations of instruments present in a frame, 5 positions of the instruments, and 14 operation notes in the annotation classes. The length of the questions ranges from a minimum of 7 words to a maximum of 12 words.The details description of the original videos can be found at the MICCAI PitVis challenge and the videos can be directly download from UCL HDR portal.