In the last decade, the need for storing videos from cataract surgery has increased significantly. Hospitals continue to improve their imaging and recording devices (e.g., microscopes and cameras used in microscopic surgery, such as ophthalmology) to enhance their post-surgical processing efficiency. The video recordings enable a lot of user-cases after the actual surgery, for example, teaching, documentation, and forensics. However, videos recorded from operations are typically stored in the internal archive without any domain-specific compression, leading to a massive storage space consumption. In this work, we propose a relevance-based compression scheme for videos from cataract surgery, which is based on content specifics of particular cataract surgery phases. We evaluate our compression scheme with three state-of-the-art video codecs, namely H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and AV1, and ask medical experts to evaluate the visual quality of encoded videos. Our results show significant savings, in particular up to 95.94% when using H.264/AVC, up to 98.71% when using H.265/HEVC, and up to 98.82% when using AV1.

翻译：在过去十年中，白内障手术视频的存储需求显著增长。医院持续改进其成像与记录设备（例如眼科显微手术中使用的显微镜和摄像头），以提升术后处理效率。视频记录支持术后多种应用场景，如教学、文档记录与法医学分析。然而，手术视频通常以未经领域特定压缩的方式存储于内部档案中，导致巨大的存储空间消耗。本研究提出一种基于相关性的白内障手术视频压缩方案，该方案利用特定手术阶段的内容特性。我们使用三种先进视频编解码器（H.264/AVC、H.265/HEVC和AV1）评估该压缩方案，并邀请医学专家对编码视频的视觉质量进行评价。结果表明，与原始视频相比，H.264/AVC实现高达95.94%的存储节约，H.265/HEVC实现高达98.71%的存储节约，AV1实现高达98.82%的存储节约。