Accurate segmentation of surgical instruments in robotic-assisted surgery is critical for enabling context-aware computer-assisted interventions, such as tool tracking, workflow analysis, and autonomous decision-making. In this study, we benchmark five deep learning architectures-UNet, UNet, DeepLabV3, Attention UNet, and SegFormer on the SAR-RARP50 dataset for multi-class semantic segmentation of surgical instruments in real-world radical prostatectomy videos. The models are trained with a compound loss function combining Cross Entropy and Dice loss to address class imbalance and capture fine object boundaries. Our experiments reveal that while convolutional models such as UNet and Attention UNet provide strong baseline performance, DeepLabV3 achieves results comparable to SegFormer, demonstrating the effectiveness of atrous convolution and multi-scale context aggregation in capturing complex surgical scenes. Transformer-based architectures like SegFormer further enhance global contextual understanding, leading to improved generalization across varying instrument appearances and surgical conditions.
This work provides a comprehensive comparison and practical insights for selecting segmentation models in surgical AI applications, highlighting the trade-offs between convolutional and transformer-based approaches.
SurgAtlas: A Large-Scale Surgical Video-Language Dataset with 2,391 Hours of Open and Minimally Invasive Surgery
University of Michigan(密歇根大学);University of Edinburgh(爱丁堡大学);Vanderbilt University Medical Center(范德比尔特大学医学中心);University of Colorado(科罗拉多大学);University of Rochester(罗切斯特大学);Michigan Medicine(密歇根医学)
Imperial College London(伦敦帝国理工学院);Tsinghua University(清华大学);NYU Abu Dhabi(纽约大学阿布扎比分校);Wuhan University(武汉大学);University College London(伦敦大学学院);University of Liverpool(利物浦大学)
Large-scale Self-supervised Video Foundation Model for Intelligent Surgery
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology(香港科技大学);German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)(德国癌症研究中心);Heidelberg University Hospital(海德堡大学医院);The Hong Kong Polytechnic University(香港理工大学);National University of Singapore(新加坡国立大学);Tongji University(同济大学);The Chinese University of Hong Kong(香港中文大学);Heidelberg University(海德堡大学);National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT)(国家肿瘤疾病中心);Shenzhen-Hong Kong Collaborative Innovation Research Institute(深港协同创新研究院)
CAT-SG: A Large Dynamic Scene Graph Dataset for Fine-Grained Understanding of Cataract Surgery
Chair for Computer-Aided Medical Procedures, Technical University Munich, Germany(计算机辅助医疗程序研究所,慕尼黑技术大学,德国);Carl Zeiss AG, Munich, Germany(蔡司股份公司,慕尼黑,德国)
OphNet: A Large-Scale Video Benchmark for Ophthalmic Surgical Workflow Understanding
Monash University(莫纳什大学);Airdoc-Monash Research(Airdoc-莫纳什研究所);Airdoc;Bosch Corporate Research(博世企业研究院);Cornell University(康奈尔大学);King’s College London(伦敦国王学院);Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR(新加坡资讯通信研究院(新加坡科技研究局下属));City University of Macau(澳门城市大学);Eye Hospital, Wenzhou Medical University(温州医科大学附属眼视光医院)
Video Dataset for Surgical Phase, Keypoint, and Instrument Recognition in Laparoscopic Surgery (PhaKIR)
Regensburg Medical Image Computing (ReMIC), OTH Regensburg(雷根斯堡医学影像计算中心(ReMIC));Regensburg Center of Biomedical Engineering (RCBE), OTH Regensburg(雷根斯堡生物医学工程中心(RCBE));Regensburg University(雷根斯堡大学);Regensburg Center of Health Sciences(雷根斯堡健康科学中心);Technical University of Munich (TUM)(慕尼黑技术大学);TUM University Hospital(慕尼黑技术大学医院);Biomedical Image Analysis Group, Department of Computing, Imperial College London(生物医学影像分析组,计算部门,伦敦帝国学院);Research Group MITI, TUM University Hospital, School of Medicine(MITI研究组,慕尼黑技术大学医院,医学学院);Department of Surgery, TUM University Hospital, School of Medicine(外科部门,慕尼黑技术大学医院,医学学院)
OSSAR: Towards Open-Set Surgical Activity Recognition in Robot-assisted Surgery
The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)(香港中文大学);Beijing Institute of Technology(北京理工大学);Qilu Hospital of Shandong University(山东大学齐鲁医院);Tongji University(同济大学);University College London(伦敦大学学院)
Explainable AI-Powered Framework for Video-Based Skill Assessment in Cataract Surgery
K.N. Toosi University of Technology(霍加托西大学);Faculties of Electrical and Computer Engineering(电气与计算机工程学院);Applied Robotics and AI Solutions (ARAS)(应用机器人与人工智能解决方案(ARAS))
Class-Incremental Domain Adaptation with Smoothing and Calibration for Surgical Report Generation
National University of Singapore(新加坡国立大学);NUSRI Suzhou(新加坡国立大学苏州研究院);Singapore General Hospital(新加坡中央医院);The Chinese University of Hong Kong(香港中文大学);Imperial College London(伦敦帝国理工学院)
Surgical Visual Domain Adaptation: Results from the MICCAI 2020 SurgVisDom Challenge
Intuitive, Inc.(直观医疗公司);Konica Minolta, Inc.(柯尼卡美能达公司);University College London(伦敦大学学院);University of Genoa(热那亚大学);University of Burgundy(勃艮第大学);German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)(德国癌症研究中心);National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT)(国家肿瘤疾病中心)
$\mathsf{CSMAE~}$:~Cataract Surgical Masked Autoencoder (MAE) based Pre-training
Johns Hopkins University(约翰斯·霍普金斯大学);Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins University(约翰斯·霍普金斯大学威尔默眼科研究所);Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, Johns Hopkins University(约翰斯·霍普金斯大学马龙医疗保健工程中心)
Toward Zero-Shot Learning for Visual Dehazing of Urological Surgical Robots
Department of Surgery, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Gastric Neoplasms, Shanghai Institute of Digestive Surgery, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine(外科科,上海胃癌重点实验室,上海消化外科研究所,瑞金医院,上海交通大学医学院);National Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University(多媒体信息处理国家级重点实验室,计算机科学学院,北京大学);Department of Urology, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine(泌尿外科,瑞金医院,上海交通大学医学院);School of Intelligent Science and Technology, Nanjing University(智能科学与技术学院,南京大学)
Revisiting Distillation for Continual Learning on Visual Question Localized-Answering in Robotic Surgery
Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS), University College London(伦敦大学学院惠康/工程与物理科学研究委员会介入与外科科学中心(WEISS));The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)(香港中文大学(CUHK));Shun Hing Institute of Advanced Engineering, CUHK(香港中文大学信兴高等工程研究所)
Surgery-R1: Advancing Surgical-VQLA with Reasoning Multimodal Large Language Model via Reinforcement Learning
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)(香港科技大学(广州));Hong Kong University of Science and Technology(香港科技大学);Department of Thoracic Surgery, the Seventh Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University(中山大学第七附属医院胸外科部门);Bioengineering/Imperial-X, Imperial College London(生物工程/Imperial-X,帝国理工学院伦敦分校);ROAS Thrust, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)(ROAS项目,香港科技大学(广州));Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Hong Kong SAR(香港特别行政区电子与计算机工程系)
Surgical-DINO: Adapter Learning of Foundation Models for Depth Estimation in Endoscopic Surgery
The Chinese University of Hong Kong(香港中文大学);Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS), University College London(伦敦大学学院惠康/工程与物理科学研究委员会介入与外科科学中心);National University of Singapore(新加坡国立大学)
Automatic Operating Room Surgical Activity Recognition for Robot-Assisted Surgery
Intuitive Surgical Inc.(直觉外科公司)
手术室(OR)中手术活动的自动识别是创建下一代智能手术设备和工作流程监控/支持系统的关键技术。这种系统可以潜在地提高OR的效率,从而降低成本并改善对患者的护理。在本文中,我们研究了机器人辅助手术中的自动手术活动识别。我们收集了第一个大规模的数据集,包括400个完整长度的多视角视频,这些视频来自使用飞行时间相机捕获的各种机器人手术病例。我们用10种最受认可和临床相关的活动类别对视频进行了密集注释。此外,我们研究了最先进的计算机视觉动作识别技术,并使其适应OR环境和数据集。首先,我们对Inflated 3D ConvNet(I3 D)进行微调,以便在我们的数据集上进行剪辑级活动识别,并使用它从视频中提取特征。然后,这些特征被馈送到3个时间高斯混合层的堆栈,该堆栈从相邻剪辑中提取上下文,并最终通过长短期记忆网络来学习全长视频中的活动顺序。我们广泛地评估了模型,并达到了88%的平均平均精度的峰值性能。
SurgBox: Agent-Driven Operating Room Sandbox with Surgery Copilot
CAIR, HKISI, CAS(中国科学院香港中文大学信息安全研究所智能计算研究中心);MAIS, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院自动化研究所多模态人工智能系统实验室);Peking Union Medical College Hospital(北京协和医院)
VS-Assistant: Versatile Surgery Assistant on the Demand of Surgeons
Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR), HKISI-CAS(香港科学院人工智能与机器人中心(CAIR));The Chinese University of Hong Kong(香港中文大学);King’s College London(伦敦国王学院)
Surgical-MambaLLM: Mamba2-enhanced Multimodal Large Language Model for VQLA in Robotic Surgery
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)(香港科学与技术大学(广州));Imperial College London(帝国理工学院伦敦分校);The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology(香港科学与技术大学)
Surgical-DeSAM: Decoupling SAM for Instrument Segmentation in Robotic Surgery
Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS)(Wellcome/EPSRC介入与外科科学中心(WEISS));University College London(伦敦大学学院);Dept. of Computer Science, University College London(伦敦大学学院计算机科学系)
EndoChat: Grounded Multimodal Large Language Model for Endoscopic Surgery
The Chinese University of Hong Kong(香港中文大学);Theory Lab, Central Research Institute, 2012 Labs, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.(华为技术有限公司中央研究院理论实验室2012实验室);Chair of Computer Aided Procedures (CAMP), Technical University of Munich(慕尼黑工业大学计算机辅助程序教席);Department of Gastroenterology, Qilu Hospital of Shandong University(山东大学齐鲁医院消化内科)
Dynamic Interactive Relation Capturing via Scene Graph Learning for Robotic Surgical Report Generation
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)(香港科技大学(广州));University College London(伦敦大学学院);The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology(香港科技大学)
SLAM based Quasi Dense Reconstruction For Minimally Invasive Surgery Scenes
IRCAD (Institut de Recherche contre les Cancers de l’Appareil Digestif)(IRCAD(消化系统癌症研究所));ICube (UMR 7357 CNRS), Université de Strasbourg(ICube(UMR 7357 CNRS),斯特拉斯堡大学);IHU, Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire(IHU,大学医院研究所);Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón (I3A), Universidad de Zaragoza(阿拉贡工程研究所(I3A),萨拉戈萨大学)