2D human pose tracking in the cardiac catheterisation laboratory with BYTE

Workflow insights can enable safety- and efficiency improvements in the Cardiac Catheterisation Laboratory (Cath Lab). Human pose tracklets from video footage can provide a source of workflow information. However, occlusions and visual similarity between personnel make the Cath Lab a challenging environment for the re-identification of individuals. We propose a human pose tracker that addresses these problems specifically, and test it on recordings of real coronary angiograms. This tracker uses no visual information for re-identification, and instead employs object keypoint similarity between detections and predictions from a third-order motion model. Algorithm performance is measured on Cath Lab footage using Higher-Order Tracking Accuracy (HOTA). To evaluate its stability during procedures, this is done separately for five different surgical steps of the procedure. We achieve up to 0.71 HOTA where tested state-of-the-art pose trackers score up to 0.65 on the used dataset. We observe that the pose tracker HOTA performance varies with up to 10 percentage point (Image 1) between workflow phases, where tested state-of-the-art trackers show differences of up to Image 2. In addition, the tracker achieves up to 22.5 frames per second, which is 9 frames per second faster than the current state-of-the-art on our setup in the Cath Lab. The fast and consistent short-term performance of the provided algorithm makes it suitable for use in workflow analysis in the Cath Lab and opens the door to real-time use-cases.