Point Tracking in Surgery--The 2025 Surgical Tattoos in Infrared Challenge (STIRC2025)

Point tracking in surgery is crucial to enable applications in downstream tasks such as segmentation, 3D reconstruction, virtual tissue landmarking, autonomous probe-based scanning, and subtask autonomy. This paper introduces the 2025 iteration of a point tracking challenge to address this, wherein participants submit their algorithms for quantification. Their algorithms are evaluated using a dataset named surgical tattoos in infrared (STIR), with the challenge named the STIR Challenge 2025 (STIRC2025). The STIR Challenge 2025 comprises two quantitative components: accuracy and efficiency. The accuracy component tests the accuracy of algorithms on in vivo and ex vivo sequences. The efficiency component tests algorithm inference latency. The challenge was conducted as a part of MICCAI EndoVis 2025, and seven teams participated in this challenge. In this paper we summarize the challenge results and participant methods. The challenge dataset is available at: https://zenodo.org/records/20191078, and the code for baseline models and metrics calculation is available here: https://github.com/athaddius/STIRMetrics