ATLAS: A Multi-Procedure Benchmark and Context-Aware Model for Surgical Anatomy Segmentation

원문 초록

Recognizing anatomical structures during minimally invasive surgery (MIS) could support intraoperative navigation and improve patient safety, but progress is limited by small, single-procedure datasets and by segmentation methods developed for natural scenes. This work addresses both limitations through a new dataset and model. First, we introduce ATLAS-120k, a clip-level semantic segmentation dataset of 121,018 annotated frames from 100 surgical videos, covering 14 laparoscopic and robot-assisted procedures and 41 classes. Annotations were created with a pipeline that combines manual labeling, tracker-based propagation, and review by surgeons. Second, we propose ATLAS (Anatomy Recognition with Context Learning using Foundation Representations), a video semantic segmentation model for surgical anatomy recognition. ATLAS builds on in-domain foundation-model embeddings and adds context queries for the procedure and surgical phase, together with query propagation between frames for short-term memory. ATLAS outperforms state-of-the-art natural-image and in-domain foundation models in both segmentation accuracy and temporal consistency, achieving a Dice score of 0.70 with ViT-L while running in real time at 76.2 FPS. Ablations show that the context queries improve accuracy and that query propagation improves temporal consistency. ATLAS also generalizes well, matching a dedicated model zero-shot on CholecSeg8k and improving phase recognition on AutoLaparo over SurgeNet initialization. The model weights, dataset annotations, and annotation tool are publicly available at https://github.com/TimJaspers0801/ATLAS.