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.
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...
This survey reviews recent advances in surgical video generation, categorizing methods into unconditional, conditional, and world modeling generation. It highlights a shift from creating visually plausible frames to modeling the causal dynamics of surgical scenes, and discusses challenges such as pixel-level fidelity versus clinical plausibility, generalization, physical realism, controllability, and interpretability. The paper also compiles experimental results from public datasets to serve as a quantitative benchmark for the field.
arXiv:2608. 14015v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding tens-of-minutes surgical videos requires long-horizon temporal reasoning, answering what happens before, after, or across stages of a procedure by grounding the question in visual evidence spread across time.
arXiv:2606. 29247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models represent a promising direction for embodied intelligence in surgical robotics.
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.
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.
SurgRAW introduces a multi‑agent, chain‑of‑thought workflow for robotic surgical video analysis, leveraging a new SurgCoTBench benchmark with 14,256 QA pairs across five surgical tasks. The system uses an orchestrator to split scene understanding into two reasoning streams, panel‑discussion‑style collaboration among task‑specific agents, and retrieval‑augmented generation to incorporate surgical knowledge. Experiments show SurgRAW outperforms mainstream vision‑language models and a supervised baseline by 14.61% accuracy.
arXiv:2609.21402v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Surgical instrument segmentation (SIS) plays a critical role in robotic assistance and surgical workflow analysis. However, most existing SIS methods f...
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 classification tools, offering transparent, quantitative performance indicators that could complement or replace traditional scoring methods.
SurgAtlas is the largest surgical video‑language dataset, containing 15,291 videos (2,391 hours) across 18 specialties and over 5,000 procedure types, all sourced from public YouTube. It uniquely includes open‑surgery videos at scale (6,182) alongside more than 9,000 minimally invasive recordings, and introduces standardized benchmarks for open‑surgery video understanding. The dataset offers a rich, multi‑tier annotation schema—segment‑level captions, step/phase descriptions, video‑level surgical narratives, and reasoning‑oriented VQA pairs—validated by experts and built through an automated LLM‑enriched pipeline. "whyItMatters":"SurgAtlas provides an unprecedentedly large, diverse, and clinically validated resource that can train and benchmark multimodal surgical AI models, advancing the development of next‑generation foundation models for surgery."
arXiv:2607. 13237v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Precise spatial-temporal annotation of laparoscopic videos is time-consuming and requires expert knowledge.
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...