Surgical instrument segmentation (SIS) is fundamental for computer-assisted surgery, where reliable instrument masks enable precise scene understanding and clinical assistance. Recently, adapting foun...
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
arXiv:2607. 29509v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective multi-organ segmentation in surgical data requires learning the intricate anatomical features and alleviating the challenge of class imbalance, which results from relatively lower proportions of small and limitedly exposed structures.
By Priya Tomar, Aditya Parikh, Christian Bauckhage, Rafet Sifa
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. 13237v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Precise spatial-temporal annotation of laparoscopic videos is time-consuming and requires expert knowledge.
By Manasa Dendukuri, Matjaz Jogan, Daniel A. Hashimoto, Guiqiu Liao
The paper introduces LaST, a large-small collaborative framework for zero-shot surgical phase recognition. It combines a foundation model that generates frame-level phase priors with a lightweight model that refines predictions through iterative temporal refinement, dynamic quality control, and dual-model cross-learning. Experiments show LaST outperforms baseline and state-of-the-art methods, achieving significant accuracy gains on unseen clinical domains.
By Yiyi Zhang, Ying Zheng, Wenxin Fan, Yu Zhu, Yuchen Yuan, Litao Zhao, Zheng Li, Pheng-Ann Heng
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:2608.24671v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Referring surgical video segmentation requires segmenting a target instrument or tissue region across video frames according to a natural language expr...
By Jiaxin Wen, Ming Yin, Lu Liu, Zeyu Fu
arXiv:2608. 20229v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Anatomically plausible segmentation remains challenging because of low contrast, ambiguous boundaries, and modality-specific artifacts.
By Mosharof Hossain, Md Rabiul Islam, Limon Halder, Erchin Serpedin, Md Kamrul Hasan
arXiv:2607. 09481v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-guided medical image segmentation leverages clinical semantics to improve lesion delineation, yet many existing models bind cross-modal fusion, supervision, and decoder design into a task-specific architecture.
By Yungeng Liu, Xuanzi Fang, Haijin Zeng, Qi Dai, Yongyong Chen
3D point cloud registration in laparoscopic surgery estimates the transformation between an intraoperative organ reconstructed from video and its preoperative mesh. Because ground-truth transformations are unavailable for real data, supervised networks are trained on synthetic organ pairs.
arXiv:2608.30844v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Interactive lesion segmentation in whole-body PET/CT requires a model to provide a strong initial prediction while also responding efficiently to spa...
By Xinglong Liang, Chunyao Lu, Tianyu Zhang, Jiaju Huang, Tao Tan, Yunchao Yin, Lishan Cai