Enhancing Surgical Documentation through Multimodal Visual-Temporal Transformers and Generative AI

The automatic summarization of surgical videos is essential for enhancing procedural documentation, supporting surgical training, and facilitating post-operative analysis. This paper presents a novel method at the intersection of artificial intelligence and medicine, aiming to develop machine learning models with direct real-world applications in surgical contexts. We propose a multi-modal framework that leverages recent advancements in computer vision and large language models to generate comprehensive video summaries. % The approach is structured in three key stages. First, surgical videos are divided into clips, and visual features are extracted at the frame level using visual transformers. This step focuses on detecting tools, tissues, organs, and surgical actions. Second, the extracted features are transformed into frame-level captions via large language models. These are then combined with temporal features, captured using a ViViT-based encoder, to produce clip-level summaries that reflect the broader context of each video segment. Finally, the clip-level descriptions are aggregated into a full surgical report using a dedicated LLM tailored for the summarization task. % We evaluate our method on the CholecT50 dataset, using instrument and action annotations from 50 laparoscopic videos. The results show strong performance, achieving 96\% precision in tool detection and a BERT score of 0.74 for temporal context summarization. This work contributes to the advancement of AI-assisted tools for surgical reporting, offering a step toward more intelligent and reliable clinical documentation.

Multi-Stakeholder Disaster Insights from Social Media Using Large Language Models

In recent years, social media has emerged as a primary channel for users to promptly share feedback and issues during disasters and emergencies, playing a key role in crisis management. While significant progress has been made in collecting and analyzing social media content, there remains a pressing need to enhance the automation, aggregation, and customization of this data to deliver actionable insights tailored to diverse stakeholders, including the press, police, EMS, and firefighters. This effort is essential for improving the coordination of activities such as relief efforts, resource distribution, and media communication. This paper presents a methodology that leverages the capabilities of LLMs to enhance disaster response and management. Our approach combines classification techniques with generative AI to bridge the gap between raw user feedback and stakeholder-specific reports. Social media posts shared during catastrophic events are analyzed with a focus on user-reported issues, service interruptions, and encountered challenges. We employ full-spectrum LLMs, using analytical models like BERT for precise, multi-dimensional classification of content type, sentiment, emotion, geolocation, and topic. Generative models such as ChatGPT are then used to produce human-readable, informative reports tailored to distinct audiences, synthesizing insights derived from detailed classifications. We compare standard approaches, which analyze posts directly using prompts in ChatGPT, to our advanced method, which incorporates multi-dimensional classification, sub-event selection, and tailored report generation. Our methodology demonstrates superior performance in both quantitative metrics, such as text coherence scores and latent representations, and qualitative assessments by automated tools and field experts, delivering precise insights for diverse disaster response stakeholders.