Recognizing Surgical Phases Anywhere: Few-Shot Test-time Adaptation and Task-graph Guided Refinement

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MCML Authors

Kun Yuan

→ Group Nassir Navab
Computer Aided Medical Procedures & Augmented Reality

Ege Özsoy

→ Group Nassir Navab
Computer Aided Medical Procedures & Augmented Reality

Long Bai

→ Group Nassir Navab
Computer Aided Medical Procedures & Augmented Reality

Nassir Navab

Prof. Dr.

Principal Investigator

Computer Aided Medical Procedures & Augmented Reality

Abstract

The complexity and diversity of surgical workflows, driven by heterogeneous operating room settings, institutional protocols, and anatomical variability, present a significant challenge in developing generalizable models for cross-institutional and cross-procedural surgical understanding. While recent surgical foundation models pretrained on large-scale vision-language data offer promising transferability, their zero-shot performance remains constrained by domain shifts, limiting their utility in unseen surgical environments. To address this, we introduce Surgical Phase Anywhere (SPA), a lightweight framework for versatile surgical workflow understanding that adapts foundation models to institutional settings with minimal annotation. SPA leverages few-shot spatial adaptation to align multi-modal embeddings with institution-specific surgical scenes and phases. It also ensures temporal consistency through diffusion modeling, which encodes task-graph priors derived from institutional procedure protocols. Finally, SPA employs dynamic test-time adaptation, exploiting the mutual agreement between multi-modal phase prediction streams to adapt the model to a given test video in a self-supervised manner, enhancing the reliability under test-time distribution shifts. SPA is a lightweight adaptation framework, allowing hospitals to rapidly customize phase recognition models by defining phases in natural language text, annotating a few images with the phase labels, and providing a task graph defining phase transitions. The experimental results show that the SPA framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot surgical phase recognition across multiple institutions and procedures, even outperforming full-shot models with 32-shot labeled data.

inproceedings