Future Slot Prediction for Unsupervised Object Discovery in Surgical Video

Object-centric slot attention is an emerging paradigm for unsupervised learning of structured, interpretable object-centric representations (slots). This enables effective reasoning about objects and events at a low computational cost and is thus applicable to critical healthcare applications, such as real-time interpretation of surgical video. The heterogeneous scenes in real-world applications like surgery are, however, difficult to parse into a meaningful set of slots. Current approaches with an adaptive slot count perform well on images, but their performance on surgical videos is low. To address this challenge, we propose a dynamic temporal slot transformer (DTST) module that is trained both for temporal reasoning and for predicting the optimal future slot initialization. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple surgical databases, demonstrating that unsupervised object-centric methods can be applied to real-world data and become part of the common arsenal in healthcare applications.

Surgeons Awareness, Expectations, and Involvement with Artificial Intelligence: a Survey Pre and Post the GPT Era

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming medicine, with generative AI models like ChatGPT reshaping perceptions of its potential. This study examines surgeons' awareness, expectations, and involvement with AI in surgery through comparative surveys conducted in 2021 and 2024. Two cross-sectional surveys were distributed globally in 2021 and 2024, the first before an IRCAD webinar and the second during the annual EAES meeting. The surveys assessed demographics, AI awareness, expectations, involvement, and ethics (2024 only). The surveys collected a total of 671 responses from 98 countries, 522 in 2021 and 149 in 2024. Awareness of AI courses rose from 14.5% in 2021 to 44.6% in 2024, while course attendance increased from 12.9% to 23%. Despite this, familiarity with foundational AI concepts remained limited. Expectations for AI's role shifted in 2024, with hospital management gaining relevance. Ethical concerns gained prominence, with 87.2% of 2024 participants emphasizing accountability and transparency. Infrastructure limitations remained the primary obstacle to implementation. Interdisciplinary collaboration and structured training were identified as critical for successful AI adoption. Optimism about AI's transformative potential remained high, with 79.9% of respondents believing AI would positively impact surgery and 96.6% willing to integrate AI into their clinical practice. Surgeons' perceptions of AI are evolving, driven by the rise of generative AI and advancements in surgical data science. While enthusiasm for integration is strong, knowledge gaps and infrastructural challenges persist. Addressing these through education, ethical frameworks, and infrastructure development is essential.

Disentangling spatio-temporal knowledge for weakly supervised object detection and segmentation in surgical video

Weakly supervised video object segmentation (WSVOS) enables the identification of segmentation maps without requiring an extensive training dataset of object masks, relying instead on coarse video labels indicating object presence. Current state-of-the-art methods either require multiple independent stages of processing that employ motion cues or, in the case of end-to-end trainable networks, lack in segmentation accuracy, in part due to the difficulty of learning segmentation maps from videos with transient object presence. This limits the application of WSVOS for semantic annotation of surgical videos where multiple surgical tools frequently move in and out of the field of view, a problem that is more difficult than typically encountered in WSVOS. This paper introduces Video Spatio-Temporal Disentanglement Networks (VDST-Net), a framework to disentangle spatiotemporal information using semi-decoupled knowledge distillation to predict high-quality class activation maps (CAMs). A teacher network designed to resolve temporal conflicts when specifics about object location and timing in the video are not provided works with a student network that integrates information over time by leveraging temporal dependencies. We demonstrate the efficacy of our framework on a public reference dataset and on a more challenging surgical video dataset where objects are, on average, present in less than 60\% of annotated frames. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques and generates superior segmentation masks under video-level weak supervision.

Understanding metric-related pitfalls in image analysis validation

Validation metrics are key for the reliable tracking of scientific progress and for bridging the current chasm between artificial intelligence (AI) research and its translation into practice. However, increasing evidence shows that particularly in image analysis, metrics are often chosen inadequately in relation to the underlying research problem. This could be attributed to a lack of accessibility of metric-related knowledge: While taking into account the individual strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of validation metrics is a critical prerequisite to making educated choices, the relevant knowledge is currently scattered and poorly accessible to individual researchers. Based on a multi-stage Delphi process conducted by a multidisciplinary expert consortium as well as extensive community feedback, the present work provides the first reliable and comprehensive common point of access to information on pitfalls related to validation metrics in image analysis. Focusing on biomedical image analysis but with the potential of transfer to other fields, the addressed pitfalls generalize across application domains and are categorized according to a newly created, domain-agnostic taxonomy. To facilitate comprehension, illustrations and specific examples accompany each pitfall. As a structured body of information accessible to researchers of all levels of expertise, this work enhances global comprehension of a key topic in image analysis validation.

Metrics reloaded: Pitfalls and recommendations for image analysis validation

The field of automatic biomedical image analysis crucially depends on robust and meaningful performance metrics for algorithm validation. Current metric usage, however, is often ill-informed and does not reflect the underlying domain interest. Here, we present a comprehensive framework that guides researchers towards choosing performance metrics in a problem-aware manner. Specifically, we focus on biomedical image analysis problems that can be interpreted as a classification task at image, object or pixel level. The framework first compiles domain interest-, target structure-, data set- and algorithm output-related properties of a given problem into a problem fingerprint, while also mapping it to the appropriate problem category, namely image-level classification, semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, or object detection. It then guides users through the process of selecting and applying a set of appropriate validation metrics while making them aware of potential pitfalls related to individual choices. In this paper, we describe the current status of the Metrics Reloaded recommendation framework, with the goal of obtaining constructive feedback from the image analysis community. The current version has been developed within an international consortium of more than 60 image analysis experts and will be made openly available as a user-friendly toolkit after community-driven optimization.

Concept Graph Neural Networks for Surgical Video Understanding

We constantly integrate our knowledge and understanding of the world to enhance our interpretation of what we see. This ability is crucial in application domains which entail reasoning about multiple entities and concepts, such as AI-augmented surgery. In this paper, we propose a novel way of integrating conceptual knowledge into temporal analysis tasks via temporal concept graph networks. In the proposed networks, a global knowledge graph is incorporated into the temporal analysis of surgical instances, learning the meaning of concepts and relations as they apply to the data. We demonstrate our results in surgical video data for tasks such as verification of critical view of safety, as well as estimation of Parkland grading scale. The results show that our method improves the recognition and detection of complex benchmarks as well as enables other analytic applications of interest.