TI-YOLO: A Lightweight and Efficient Anatomical Structure Detection Model for Tracheal Intubation

Accurate and rapid detection of anatomical structures, such as the glottis, is critical during tracheal intubation (TI) to ensure patient safety and procedural success. However, it remains a challenge due to the limited field of view and computational resources of video laryngoscopy, especially for difficult airway situations. Existing deep learning (DL) models struggle to balance high accuracy and real-time clinical deployment. To address these issues, we propose TI-YOLO (TI-You Only Look Once), a lightweight and efficient object detection model built upon the YOLOv11 architecture. TI-YOLO introduces the Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) module for multi-scale feature fusion, effectively enhancing the ability to detect anatomical structures of different sizes. TI-YOLO integrates the Deformable Attention Transformer (DAT) module to enhance the perception of crucial regions, improving detection accuracy and robustness. To further reduce the consumption of computational resources while maintaining efficiency, TI-YOLO is optimized by reconstructing the backbone based on MobileNetV4. Furthermore, TI-YOLO employs the Slide Weight Function (SWF) as a loss function during model training to mitigate the class imbalance within the dataset. One self-built dataset is used to validate the effectiveness of TI-YOLO. Compared to the original YOLOv11, TI-YOLO achieves mean Average Precision at IoU 0.50 (mAP50) scores of 0.902, with improvements of 3.8%. Meanwhile, TI-YOLO balances detection accuracy and computational efficiency with a 10.5% reduction in floating-point operations (FLOPs) and a 28.9% reduction in parameters, and the model weight is only 4.6 MB. Additionally, to evaluate TI-YOLO real-time inference capability, we quantize and deploy it on a low-cost embedded OrangePi 5 platform. The inference speed reaches over 50 frames per second (FPS), meeting real-time clinical requirements.