OrthoDetNet: An Enhanced YOLO-Based Framework for Detection of Orthopedic Surgical Instruments

Accurate detection of surgical instruments is critical for both routine surgical procedures and surgical robotics research. To the best of our knowledge, there is a notable lack of datasets and dedicated detection studies specifically addressing orthopedic surgical instruments. Detecting orthopedic surgical instruments presents particular challenges including significant size variations, highly similar shapes, and frequent, severe occlusions due to instrument intersections. To address these issues, we propose an orthopedic surgical instrument detection method (OrthoDetNet) incorporating three specialized modules. The FilterUnit mitigates occlusion effects via an adaptive feature filtering mechanism, that dynamically adjusts its filtering strategy based on context, prioritizing features from key regions while suppressing distracting interference features. The DEUnit enhances fine-grained feature discrimination in local regions to distinguish instruments with high shape similarity, and the BDFusion module improves multi-scale detection performance through bi-directional feature fusion between deep and shallow-level feature maps. A dataset for orthopedic surgical instrument detection is created, which is based on the proximal femoral nail antirotation (PFNA) instrument package manufactured by Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics Co., Ltd. Images were captured in a controlled, simulated experimental environment, ensuring no patient privacy or ethical concerns. We obtained explicit authorization from the manufacturer for instrument use. Experimental results on this dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the OrthoDetNet and its constituent modules. Our code will be available at https://github.com/xumoons/OrthoDetNet after publication.