SurgLLM: A Versatile Large Multimodal Model with Spatial Focus and Temporal Awareness for Surgical Video Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Zhen, Luo, Xingjian, Yuan, Kun, Wu, Jinlin, Chan, Danny T. M., Navab, Nassir, Liu, Hongbin, Lei, Zhen, Luo, Jiebo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Chen, Zhen
Luo, Xingjian
Yuan, Kun
Wu, Jinlin
Chan, Danny T. M.
Navab, Nassir
Liu, Hongbin
Lei, Zhen
Luo, Jiebo
author_facet Chen, Zhen
Luo, Xingjian
Yuan, Kun
Wu, Jinlin
Chan, Danny T. M.
Navab, Nassir
Liu, Hongbin
Lei, Zhen
Luo, Jiebo
contents Surgical video understanding is crucial for facilitating Computer-Assisted Surgery (CAS) systems. Despite significant progress in existing studies, two major limitations persist, including inadequate visual content perception and insufficient temporal awareness in surgical videos, and hinder the development of versatile CAS solutions. In this work, we propose the SurgLLM framework, an effective large multimodal model tailored for versatile surgical video understanding tasks with enhanced spatial focus and temporal awareness. Specifically, to empower the spatial focus of surgical videos, we first devise Surgical Context-aware Multimodal Pretraining (Surg-Pretrain) for the video encoder of SurgLLM, by performing instrument-centric Masked Video Reconstruction (MV-Recon) and subsequent multimodal alignment. To incorporate surgical temporal knowledge into SurgLLM, we further propose Temporal-aware Multimodal Tuning (TM-Tuning) to enhance temporal reasoning with interleaved multimodal embeddings. Moreover, to accommodate various understanding tasks of surgical videos without conflicts, we devise a Surgical Task Dynamic Ensemble to efficiently triage a query with optimal learnable parameters in our SurgLLM. Extensive experiments performed on diverse surgical video understanding tasks, including captioning, general VQA, and temporal VQA, demonstrate significant improvements over the state-of-the-art approaches, validating the effectiveness of our SurgLLM in versatile surgical video understanding. The source code is available at https://github.com/franciszchen/SurgLLM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_00357
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SurgLLM: A Versatile Large Multimodal Model with Spatial Focus and Temporal Awareness for Surgical Video Understanding
Chen, Zhen
Luo, Xingjian
Yuan, Kun
Wu, Jinlin
Chan, Danny T. M.
Navab, Nassir
Liu, Hongbin
Lei, Zhen
Luo, Jiebo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Surgical video understanding is crucial for facilitating Computer-Assisted Surgery (CAS) systems. Despite significant progress in existing studies, two major limitations persist, including inadequate visual content perception and insufficient temporal awareness in surgical videos, and hinder the development of versatile CAS solutions. In this work, we propose the SurgLLM framework, an effective large multimodal model tailored for versatile surgical video understanding tasks with enhanced spatial focus and temporal awareness. Specifically, to empower the spatial focus of surgical videos, we first devise Surgical Context-aware Multimodal Pretraining (Surg-Pretrain) for the video encoder of SurgLLM, by performing instrument-centric Masked Video Reconstruction (MV-Recon) and subsequent multimodal alignment. To incorporate surgical temporal knowledge into SurgLLM, we further propose Temporal-aware Multimodal Tuning (TM-Tuning) to enhance temporal reasoning with interleaved multimodal embeddings. Moreover, to accommodate various understanding tasks of surgical videos without conflicts, we devise a Surgical Task Dynamic Ensemble to efficiently triage a query with optimal learnable parameters in our SurgLLM. Extensive experiments performed on diverse surgical video understanding tasks, including captioning, general VQA, and temporal VQA, demonstrate significant improvements over the state-of-the-art approaches, validating the effectiveness of our SurgLLM in versatile surgical video understanding. The source code is available at https://github.com/franciszchen/SurgLLM.
title SurgLLM: A Versatile Large Multimodal Model with Spatial Focus and Temporal Awareness for Surgical Video Understanding
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00357