Dynamic Robot-Assisted Surgery with Hierarchical Class-Incremental Semantic Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hindel, Julia, Mekic, Ema, Karthik, Enamundram Naga, Mohan, Rohit, Cattaneo, Daniele, Kalweit, Maria, Valada, Abhinav
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909730366029824
author Hindel, Julia
Mekic, Ema
Karthik, Enamundram Naga
Mohan, Rohit
Cattaneo, Daniele
Kalweit, Maria
Valada, Abhinav
author_facet Hindel, Julia
Mekic, Ema
Karthik, Enamundram Naga
Mohan, Rohit
Cattaneo, Daniele
Kalweit, Maria
Valada, Abhinav
contents Robot-assisted surgeries rely on accurate and real-time scene understanding to safely guide surgical instruments. However, segmentation models trained on static datasets face key limitations when deployed in these dynamic and evolving surgical environments. Class-incremental semantic segmentation (CISS) allows models to continually adapt to new classes while avoiding catastrophic forgetting of prior knowledge, without training on previous data. In this work, we build upon the recently introduced Taxonomy-Oriented Poincaré-regularized Incremental Class Segmentation (TOPICS) approach and propose an enhanced variant, termed TOPICS+, specifically tailored for robust segmentation of surgical scenes. Concretely, we incorporate the Dice loss into the hierarchical loss formulation to handle strong class imbalances, introduce hierarchical pseudo-labeling, and design tailored label taxonomies for robotic surgery environments. We also propose six novel CISS benchmarks designed for robotic surgery environments including multiple incremental steps and several semantic categories to emulate realistic class-incremental settings in surgical environments. In addition, we introduce a refined set of labels with more than 144 classes on the Syn-Mediverse synthetic dataset, hosted online as an evaluation benchmark. We make the code and trained models publicly available at http://topics.cs.uni-freiburg.de.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_01713
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Dynamic Robot-Assisted Surgery with Hierarchical Class-Incremental Semantic Segmentation
Hindel, Julia
Mekic, Ema
Karthik, Enamundram Naga
Mohan, Rohit
Cattaneo, Daniele
Kalweit, Maria
Valada, Abhinav
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Robot-assisted surgeries rely on accurate and real-time scene understanding to safely guide surgical instruments. However, segmentation models trained on static datasets face key limitations when deployed in these dynamic and evolving surgical environments. Class-incremental semantic segmentation (CISS) allows models to continually adapt to new classes while avoiding catastrophic forgetting of prior knowledge, without training on previous data. In this work, we build upon the recently introduced Taxonomy-Oriented Poincaré-regularized Incremental Class Segmentation (TOPICS) approach and propose an enhanced variant, termed TOPICS+, specifically tailored for robust segmentation of surgical scenes. Concretely, we incorporate the Dice loss into the hierarchical loss formulation to handle strong class imbalances, introduce hierarchical pseudo-labeling, and design tailored label taxonomies for robotic surgery environments. We also propose six novel CISS benchmarks designed for robotic surgery environments including multiple incremental steps and several semantic categories to emulate realistic class-incremental settings in surgical environments. In addition, we introduce a refined set of labels with more than 144 classes on the Syn-Mediverse synthetic dataset, hosted online as an evaluation benchmark. We make the code and trained models publicly available at http://topics.cs.uni-freiburg.de.
title Dynamic Robot-Assisted Surgery with Hierarchical Class-Incremental Semantic Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01713