ReSW-VL: Representation Learning for Surgical Workflow Analysis Using Vision-Language Model
This work addresses surgical workflow analysis for medical applications, but it is incremental as it adapts existing vision-language models to a specific domain.
The authors tackled the problem of surgical phase recognition from video by proposing a representation learning method using a vision-language model, which outperformed conventional methods on three datasets.
Surgical phase recognition from video is a technology that automatically classifies the progress of a surgical procedure and has a wide range of potential applications, including real-time surgical support, optimization of medical resources, training and skill assessment, and safety improvement. Recent advances in surgical phase recognition technology have focused primarily on Transform-based methods, although methods that extract spatial features from individual frames using a CNN and video features from the resulting time series of spatial features using time series modeling have shown high performance. However, there remains a paucity of research on training methods for CNNs employed for feature extraction or representation learning in surgical phase recognition. In this study, we propose a method for representation learning in surgical workflow analysis using a vision-language model (ReSW-VL). Our proposed method involves fine-tuning the image encoder of a CLIP (Convolutional Language Image Model) vision-language model using prompt learning for surgical phase recognition. The experimental results on three surgical phase recognition datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison to conventional methods.