Effective multi-task learning for surgical scene understanding is fundamentally hindered by annotation granularity mismatch; temporal workflow tasks such as phase recognition, step recognition and anticipation benefit from dense frame-level supervision, whereas pixel-level spatial tasks including instrument segmentation and action recognition are only sparsely annotated on selected keyframes due to prohibitive labeling costs. This supervision imbalance undermines shared representation learning and limits joint optimization across heterogeneous surgical tasks.
arXiv:2607. 17508v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Retrieval-Augmented Interpretable Learning (RAIL), a probabilistic meta-learning framework for zero-shot generation of task-specific interpretable models that synthesizes coefficient-space structure from natural-language task descriptions and a memory of previously learned task-specific predictors.
By Sazan Mahbub, Caleb Ellington, Zhiyuan Li, Yixin Yang, Souvik Kundu, Ben Lengerich, Eric P. Xing
The paper introduces SurgFUTR, a state‑change learning framework for predicting future events in endoscopic videos. Instead of forecasting raw observations, it classifies transitions between current and future states using a teacher‑student architecture and an Action Dynamics module. The authors also present SFPBench, a benchmark with five short‑ and long‑term prediction tasks, and demonstrate consistent improvements across multiple datasets and procedures, including cross‑procedure transfer.
By Saurav Sharma, Chinedu Innocent Nwoye, Didier Mutter, Nicolas Padoy
arXiv:2608.24541v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Surgical instrument segmentation (SIS) is fundamental for computer-assisted surgery, where reliable instrument masks enable precise scene understanding...
By Xinning Yao, Jingjing Wang, Jinghua Yue, Xiaoyan Luo, Fugen Zhou, Bo Liu
Surgical instrument segmentation (SIS) is fundamental for computer-assisted surgery, where reliable instrument masks enable precise scene understanding and clinical assistance. Recently, adapting foun...
arXiv:2608.31065v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Surgical phase recognition is key to context-aware computer-assisted feedback in vitreoretinal procedures, yet the scarcity of synchronized multimodal...
By Onur Izmitlioglu, Shervin Dehghani, Tarek Ghannoum, Benedikt Schworm, Nassir Navab
The paper introduces Locked Image Multiple Instance PreTraining (LIMIT), a method that aligns slide‑level pathology reports with patch‑level visual features by freezing a vision encoder and fine‑tuning a text encoder. LIMIT uses report embeddings as cross‑attention queries over bags of patch features, optimizing slide representations via InfoNCE. Applying LIMIT, the authors create CONCH‑Z, which achieves state‑of‑the‑art zero‑shot performance on 22 pathology tasks, outperforming vision‑language encoders trained on curated caption datasets and narrowing the gap with larger slide‑level foundation models.
By Daniel Shao, Dongmin Bang, Luca L. Weishaupt, Sophia J. Wagner, Nic G. Reitsam, Ming Y. Lu, Long P. Le, Richard J. Chen, Faisal Mahmood
arXiv:2607. 15447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent research in clinical machine learning, focusing on outcome predictions in intensive care unit (ICU), has shifted from bespoke supervised models to foundation models, utilising modern representation learning methods.
By Jingteng Li, Alexander Capstick, Louise Rigny, Iona Biggart, Neil J Sebire, Payam Barnaghi
arXiv:2608. 04472v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The development of foundation models (FMs) is crucial for advancing endoscopic image analysis.
By Zhenyu Yi, Jianwei Xu, Yue Hu, Zhongwei Qiu, Sijing Li, Liang Huang, Bin Lv, Ling Zhang, Yingda Xia
The paper presents a method for localizing functional surgical landmarks—specifically instrument tips and anchors—in surgical videos without requiring manual pixel-level mask annotations. It leverages vision foundation models, such as SAM 3, to generate dense structural priors through zero‑shot, point‑prompted masks, and refines landmark predictions with a lightweight, coarse‑to‑fine multi‑frame network. Experiments on 7,867 clips from 60 videos show that the approach achieves F1 scores of 72.4% for tip and 58.0% for anchor localization, with ablations confirming the benefits of structural priors and refinement stages.
By Chenyan Jing, Hao Ding, Lalithkumar Seenivasan, Jacob M. Delgado L\'opez, Mathias Unberath
TRACE is a training-time framework that uses structured radiology reports to guide concept editing, allowing image-only diagnosis during inference. It refines image-derived concepts with a teacher-guided editing mechanism in a malignancy-aware ordered concept space and introduces Strategic Concept Missing Training to handle incomplete annotations. The authors also present BUSC, a benchmark linking images, labels, and structured attributes, and show that TRACE outperforms existing methods on multiple datasets with better cross-domain robustness.
By Wentao Yue, Tianyou Lai, Jiayu Luo, Qingyu Mao, Ziying Wang, Zhenyuan Ning, Qilei Li
OphBiWSSD is a new framework for temporal action localization in ophthalmic surgeries that uses Bidirectional State Space Duality to avoid the quadratic memory cost of Transformers. It employs a weight‑tied selective scan that incorporates both past and future surgical context, enabling linear‑time global synthesis of non‑causal temporal cues. On the OphNet benchmark, OphBiWSSD achieves state‑of‑the‑art mean Average Precisions of 44.42 % for phases and 43.08 % for operations, outperforming baselines by 6.80 % and 6.66 % respectively.
By Yang Liu, Qionghong Ma, Joongwon Chae, Lihui Luo, Yibing Shen, Yulin Zhuo, Yingting Zhu, Jiashu Chang, Xiaoyun Zhong, Dongmei Yu, Peter E. Lobie, Peiwu Qin, Chengming Yang