The paper introduces an explainable AI framework for automated skill assessment in cataract surgery, leveraging the world’s largest dataset of 2,000 surgical videos. Using advanced computer vision and signal‑processing techniques, the system extracts ten objective motion‑based metrics that correlate strongly with expert subjective ratings, achieving up to 87% accuracy. The framework’s explainability distinguishes it from prior opaque models, offering transparent, quantitative performance indicators that could complement or replace traditional subjective scoring.
Background: Laparoscopic camera navigation (LCN) is a critical skill, yet its current assessment typically relies on manual rating systems which are time-consuming and difficult to scale. Automated feedback could significantly enhance surgical training by providing immediate, standardized metrics.
arXiv:2608.30872v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Objective assessment of surgical technical skill is important for surgical training and structured feedback, but current workflows remain dependent on...
By Chaohui Dang, Zheheng Jiang, James Glasbey, David Luke, Theodoros Arvanitis, Le Zhang
arXiv:2606. 30657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Surgical outcomes depend not only on patient factors and postoperative care but are also strongly influenced by the quality of the operation itself.
By Pietro Mascagni, Lalith Sharan, Deepak Alapatt, Nicolas Padoy
arXiv:2603. 27341v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) models have matched or exceeded human experts in several benchmarks of biomedical task performance, but surgical benchmarks in particular are often missing from prominent medical benchmark suites.
By Kirill Skobelev, Eric Fithian, Yegor Baranovski, Jack Cook, Sandeep Angara, Shauna Otto, Zhuang-Fang Yi, John Zhu, Neeraj Mainkar, Margaux Masson-Forsythe, Daniel A. Donoho, X. Y. Han
This study investigates whether vision‑based models for surgical skill assessment learn representations that transfer across different scoring rubrics (GOALS and OSATS) using the LASANA and JIGSAWS datasets. By evaluating end‑to‑end training, Adaptive Sharpness‑Aware Minimization, and self‑supervised/contrastive pretraining, the authors find that models pretrained on JIGSAWS can transfer reasonably well to LASANA, but transfer to JIGSAWS fails, likely due to annotation inconsistencies. Control experiments with a Kinetics‑pretrained backbone show that task‑specific heads carry most of the skill prediction load, while the backbone provides general spatiotemporal features.
By Hanna Hoffmann, Felix von Bechtolsheim, Stefanie Speidel, Rebecca Hisey
arXiv:2610.01205v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Objective assessment of microsurgical technical skill is essential for competency-based training and quality assurance, yet existing video-based approa...
By Jecia Z. Y. Mao, Sue M. Cho, Francis X. Creighton, Deepa Galaiya, Russell H. Taylor, Manish Sahu
arXiv:2603.29962v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Surgical procedures are inherently complex and risky, requiring extensive expertise and constant focus to navigate evolving intraoperative scenes....
By Shi Li, Vinkle Srivastav, Nicolas Chanel, Saurav Sharma, Nabani Banik, Lorenzo Arboit, Kun Yuan, Pietro Mascagni, Nicolas Padoy
arXiv:2609.24619v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The proposed pipeline integrates a representation-flow convolutional neural network with a dynamics- and uncertainty-aware tree-based Gaussian Process...
By Arefeh Rezaei, Mohammad Javad Ahmadi, Amir Molaei, Hamid D. Taghirad
The FedSurg Challenge is the first international effort to evaluate Federated Learning (FL) for surgical vision, using a multi‑center dataset of laparoscopic appendectomies. Three participant models were tested for generalization to an unseen clinical center and for center‑specific adaptation, compared against centralized, Swarm Learning, and parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning baselines. The study found that temporal modeling most consistently improves generalization, but overall performance remains low (26.31% F1‑score on the unseen center), highlighting the need for structured personalized FL and revealing limitations of current approaches.
By Max Kirchner, Hanna Hoffmann, Alexander C. Jenke, Oliver L. Saldanha, Kevin Pfeiffer, Weam Kanjo, Julia Alekseenko, Claas de Boer, Santhi Raj Kolamuri, Lorenzo Mazza, Nicolas Padoy, Sophia Bano, Annika Reinke, Lena Maier-Hein, Danail Stoyanov, Jakob N. Kather, Fiona R. Kolbinger, Sebastian Bodenstedt, Stefanie Speidel
arXiv:2608.21441v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Automated training of surgeons is one of the most crucial factors that significantly minimize surgical training risks and expenses. With recent advan...
By Mohammad Javad Ahmadi, Hamid D. Taghirad
arXiv:2608.02471v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: In laparoscopy, surgeon gaze tracks where the instruments will act; easing this demand through visual attention modeling requires dense label...
By Jiayu Gu, Yiwei Wang, Jie Zhang, Guojun Cao, Keshen Lyu, Song Zhou, Yimeng Chen, Haorui Wang, Qingmin Feng, Shenchao Shi, Hongkuan Shi, Qiuyu Yu, Qiang Xie, Huan Zhao, Wenbin Chen, Caihua Xiong, Chidan Wan, Jing Samantha Pan, Xiong Cai, Han Ding