Chain-of-Look Spatial Reasoning for Dense Surgical Instrument Counting

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Bhyri, Rishikesh, Quaranto, Brian R, Seger, Philip J, Tung, Kaity, Fox, Brendan, Yang, Gene, Schwaitzberg, Steven D., Yuan, Junsong, Xi, Nan, Kim, Peter C W
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Bhyri, Rishikesh
Quaranto, Brian R
Seger, Philip J
Tung, Kaity
Fox, Brendan
Yang, Gene
Schwaitzberg, Steven D.
Yuan, Junsong
Xi, Nan
Kim, Peter C W
author_facet Bhyri, Rishikesh
Quaranto, Brian R
Seger, Philip J
Tung, Kaity
Fox, Brendan
Yang, Gene
Schwaitzberg, Steven D.
Yuan, Junsong
Xi, Nan
Kim, Peter C W
contents Accurate counting of surgical instruments in Operating Rooms (OR) is a critical prerequisite for ensuring patient safety during surgery. Despite recent progress of large visual-language models and agentic AI, accurately counting such instruments remains highly challenging, particularly in dense scenarios where instruments are tightly clustered. To address this problem, we introduce Chain-of-Look, a novel visual reasoning framework that mimics the sequential human counting process by enforcing a structured visual chain, rather than relying on classic object detection which is unordered. This visual chain guides the model to count along a coherent spatial trajectory, improving accuracy in complex scenes. To further enforce the physical plausibility of the visual chain, we introduce the neighboring loss function, which explicitly models the spatial constraints inherent to densely packed surgical instruments. We also present SurgCount-HD, a new dataset comprising 1,464 high-density surgical instrument images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for counting (e.g., CountGD, REC) as well as Multimodality Large Language Models (e.g., Qwen, ChatGPT) in the challenging task of dense surgical instrument counting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_11024
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Chain-of-Look Spatial Reasoning for Dense Surgical Instrument Counting
Bhyri, Rishikesh
Quaranto, Brian R
Seger, Philip J
Tung, Kaity
Fox, Brendan
Yang, Gene
Schwaitzberg, Steven D.
Yuan, Junsong
Xi, Nan
Kim, Peter C W
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Accurate counting of surgical instruments in Operating Rooms (OR) is a critical prerequisite for ensuring patient safety during surgery. Despite recent progress of large visual-language models and agentic AI, accurately counting such instruments remains highly challenging, particularly in dense scenarios where instruments are tightly clustered. To address this problem, we introduce Chain-of-Look, a novel visual reasoning framework that mimics the sequential human counting process by enforcing a structured visual chain, rather than relying on classic object detection which is unordered. This visual chain guides the model to count along a coherent spatial trajectory, improving accuracy in complex scenes. To further enforce the physical plausibility of the visual chain, we introduce the neighboring loss function, which explicitly models the spatial constraints inherent to densely packed surgical instruments. We also present SurgCount-HD, a new dataset comprising 1,464 high-density surgical instrument images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for counting (e.g., CountGD, REC) as well as Multimodality Large Language Models (e.g., Qwen, ChatGPT) in the challenging task of dense surgical instrument counting.
title Chain-of-Look Spatial Reasoning for Dense Surgical Instrument Counting
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11024