Federated Learning for Surgical Vision in Appendicitis Classification: Results of the FedSurg EndoVis 2024 Challenge
This establishes the first benchmark for federated learning in surgical video classification, addressing data privacy concerns in clinical AI, though it is incremental in evaluating existing methods on a new dataset.
The FedSurg challenge benchmarked federated learning methods for classifying appendicitis inflammation stages from surgical videos, finding that generalization to unseen clinical centers was limited but local fine-tuning improved performance, with a ViViT-based approach achieving the strongest results.
Purpose: The FedSurg challenge was designed to benchmark the state of the art in federated learning for surgical video classification. Its goal was to assess how well current methods generalize to unseen clinical centers and adapt through local fine-tuning while enabling collaborative model development without sharing patient data. Methods: Participants developed strategies to classify inflammation stages in appendicitis using a preliminary version of the multi-center Appendix300 video dataset. The challenge evaluated two tasks: generalization to an unseen center and center-specific adaptation after fine-tuning. Submitted approaches included foundation models with linear probing, metric learning with triplet loss, and various FL aggregation schemes (FedAvg, FedMedian, FedSAM). Performance was assessed using F1-score and Expected Cost, with ranking robustness evaluated via bootstrapping and statistical testing. Results: In the generalization task, performance across centers was limited. In the adaptation task, all teams improved after fine-tuning, though ranking stability was low. The ViViT-based submission achieved the strongest overall performance. The challenge highlighted limitations in generalization, sensitivity to class imbalance, and difficulties in hyperparameter tuning in decentralized training, while spatiotemporal modeling and context-aware preprocessing emerged as promising strategies. Conclusion: The FedSurg Challenge establishes the first benchmark for evaluating FL strategies in surgical video classification. Findings highlight the trade-off between local personalization and global robustness, and underscore the importance of architecture choice, preprocessing, and loss design. This benchmarking offers a reference point for future development of imbalance-aware, adaptive, and robust FL methods in clinical surgical AI.