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Main Authors: Ashraf, Tajamul, Riyaz, Abrar Ul, Tak, Wasif, Tariq, Tavaheed, Yadav, Sonia, Abdar, Moloud, Bashir, Janibul
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01108
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author Ashraf, Tajamul
Riyaz, Abrar Ul
Tak, Wasif
Tariq, Tavaheed
Yadav, Sonia
Abdar, Moloud
Bashir, Janibul
author_facet Ashraf, Tajamul
Riyaz, Abrar Ul
Tak, Wasif
Tariq, Tavaheed
Yadav, Sonia
Abdar, Moloud
Bashir, Janibul
contents Clinically reliable perception of surgical scenes is essential for advancing intelligent, context-aware intraoperative assistance such as instrument handoff guidance, collision avoidance, and workflow-aware robotic support. Existing surgical tool benchmarks primarily evaluate category-level segmentation, requiring models to detect all instances of predefined instrument classes. However, real-world clinical decisions often require resolving references to a specific instrument instance based on its functional role, spatial relation, or anatomical interaction capabilities not captured by current evaluation paradigms. We introduce GroundedSurg, the first language-conditioned, instance-level surgical grounding benchmark. Each instance pairs a surgical image with a natural-language description targeting a single instrument, accompanied by structured spatial grounding annotations including bounding boxes and point-level anchors. The dataset spans ophthalmic, laparoscopic, robotic, and open procedures, encompassing diverse instrument types, imaging conditions, and operative complexities. By jointly evaluating linguistic reference resolution and pixel-level localization, GroundedSurg enables a systematic and realistic evaluation of vision-language models in clinically realistic multi-instrument scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate substantial performance gaps across modern segmentation and VLMs, highlighting the urgent need for clinically grounded vision-language reasoning in surgical AI systems. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/gaash-lab/GroundedSurg
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_01108
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GroundedSurg: A Multi-Procedure Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Surgical Tool Segmentation
Ashraf, Tajamul
Riyaz, Abrar Ul
Tak, Wasif
Tariq, Tavaheed
Yadav, Sonia
Abdar, Moloud
Bashir, Janibul
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Clinically reliable perception of surgical scenes is essential for advancing intelligent, context-aware intraoperative assistance such as instrument handoff guidance, collision avoidance, and workflow-aware robotic support. Existing surgical tool benchmarks primarily evaluate category-level segmentation, requiring models to detect all instances of predefined instrument classes. However, real-world clinical decisions often require resolving references to a specific instrument instance based on its functional role, spatial relation, or anatomical interaction capabilities not captured by current evaluation paradigms. We introduce GroundedSurg, the first language-conditioned, instance-level surgical grounding benchmark. Each instance pairs a surgical image with a natural-language description targeting a single instrument, accompanied by structured spatial grounding annotations including bounding boxes and point-level anchors. The dataset spans ophthalmic, laparoscopic, robotic, and open procedures, encompassing diverse instrument types, imaging conditions, and operative complexities. By jointly evaluating linguistic reference resolution and pixel-level localization, GroundedSurg enables a systematic and realistic evaluation of vision-language models in clinically realistic multi-instrument scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate substantial performance gaps across modern segmentation and VLMs, highlighting the urgent need for clinically grounded vision-language reasoning in surgical AI systems. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/gaash-lab/GroundedSurg
title GroundedSurg: A Multi-Procedure Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Surgical Tool Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01108