arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

Dense Structural Priors for Sparse Functional Landmark Localization in Surgical Videos

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 Machine Learning
Aug 4

Slot2Text: Object-Centric Visual Tokenization for Efficient and Spatially Traceable Surgical MLLMs

arXiv:2608. 01473v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLM) for surgical scene understanding typically inject hundreds of dense visual tokens into a language model, leading to costly inference and limited spatial traceability for generated answers.

By Guiqiu Liao, Matjaz Jogan, Daniel A. Hashimoto
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Action-grounded tissue affordance enables anticipatory auto-framing that lowers surgeon cognitive workload during laparoscopic surgery

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

SurgTEMP: Temporal-Aware Surgical Video Question Answering with Text-guided Visual Memory for Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy

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