Papers › Unsupervised Surgical Instrument Segmentation via Anchor Generation and Semantic Diffusion
Unsupervised Surgical Instrument Segmentation via Anchor Generation and Semantic Diffusion
Daochang Liu, Yuhui Wei, Tingting Jiang, Yizhou Wang, Rulin Miao, Fei Shan, Ziyu Li
Surgical instrument segmentation is a key component in developing context-aware operating rooms. Existing works on this task heavily rely on the supervision of a large amount of labeled data, which involve laborious and expensive human efforts. In contrast, a more affordable unsupervised approach is developed in this paper. To train our model, we first generate anchors as pseudo labels for instruments and background tissues respectively by fusing coarse handcrafted cues. Then a semantic diffusion loss is proposed to resolve the ambiguity in the generated anchors via the feature correlation between adjacent video frames. In the experiments on the binary instrument segmentation task of the 2017 MICCAI EndoVis Robotic Instrument Segmentation Challenge dataset, the proposed method achieves 0.71 IoU and 0.81 Dice score without using a single manual annotation, which is promising to show the potential of unsupervised learning for surgical tool segmentation.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections