Papers › Weakly-Supervised Learning for Tool Localization in Laparoscopic Videos

Weakly-Supervised Learning for Tool Localization in Laparoscopic Videos

14 Jun 2018arXiv:1806.05573archive 2025-07-28

Armine Vardazaryan, Didier Mutter, Jacques Marescaux, Nicolas Padoy

Surgical tool localization is an essential task for the automatic analysis of endoscopic videos. In the literature, existing methods for tool localization, tracking and segmentation require training data that is fully annotated, thereby limiting the size of the datasets that can be used and the generalization of the approaches. In this work, we propose to circumvent the lack of annotated data with weak supervision. We propose a deep architecture, trained solely on image level annotations, that can be used for both tool presence detection and localization in surgical videos. Our architecture relies on a fully convolutional neural network, trained end-to-end, enabling us to localize surgical tools without explicit spatial annotations. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on a large public dataset, Cholec80, which is fully annotated with binary tool presence information and of which 5 videos have been fully annotated with bounding boxes and tool centers for the evaluation.

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CAMMA-public/ai4surgery mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report

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Tasks

Surgical tool detectionWeakly-supervised Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Surgical tool detection Cholec80 FCN mAP 87.4 #4 of 6 Archive leaderboard report

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