Real-time video segmentation is a promising opportunity for AI-assisted surgery, offering intraoperative guidance by identifying tools and anatomical structures. Despite growing interest in surgical video segmentation, annotation protocols vary widely across datasets – some provide dense, frame-by-frame labels, while others rely on sparse annotations sampled at low frame rates such as 1 FPS. In this study, we investigate how such inconsistencies in annotation density and frame rate sampling influence the evaluation of zero-shot segmentation models, using SAM2 as a case study for cholecystectomy procedures. Surprisingly, we find that under conventional sparse evaluation settings, lower frame rates can appear to outperform higher ones due to a smoothing effect that conceals temporal inconsistencies. However, when assessed under real-time streaming conditions, higher frame rates yield superior segmentation stability, particularly for dynamic objects like surgical graspers. To understand how these differences align with human perception, we conducted a survey among surgeons, nurses, and machine learning engineers and found that participants consistently preferred high-FPS segmentation overlays, reinforcing the importance of evaluating every frame in real-time applications rather than relying on sparse sampling strategies. Our findings highlight the risk of evaluation bias that is introduced by inconsistent dataset protocols and bring attention to the need for temporally fair benchmarking in surgical video AI.

错误:搜索内容不能为空,请输入英文关键词
错误:关键词超出字数限制,请精简
高级检索

Revisiting the Evaluation Bias Introduced by Frame Sampling Strategies in Surgical Video Segmentation Using SAM2

  • Utku Ozbulak,
  • Seyed Amir Mousavi,
  • Francesca Tozzi,
  • Niki Rashidian,
  • Wouter Willaert,
  • Wesley De Neve,
  • Joris Vankerschaver

摘要

Real-time video segmentation is a promising opportunity for AI-assisted surgery, offering intraoperative guidance by identifying tools and anatomical structures. Despite growing interest in surgical video segmentation, annotation protocols vary widely across datasets – some provide dense, frame-by-frame labels, while others rely on sparse annotations sampled at low frame rates such as 1 FPS. In this study, we investigate how such inconsistencies in annotation density and frame rate sampling influence the evaluation of zero-shot segmentation models, using SAM2 as a case study for cholecystectomy procedures. Surprisingly, we find that under conventional sparse evaluation settings, lower frame rates can appear to outperform higher ones due to a smoothing effect that conceals temporal inconsistencies. However, when assessed under real-time streaming conditions, higher frame rates yield superior segmentation stability, particularly for dynamic objects like surgical graspers. To understand how these differences align with human perception, we conducted a survey among surgeons, nurses, and machine learning engineers and found that participants consistently preferred high-FPS segmentation overlays, reinforcing the importance of evaluating every frame in real-time applications rather than relying on sparse sampling strategies. Our findings highlight the risk of evaluation bias that is introduced by inconsistent dataset protocols and bring attention to the need for temporally fair benchmarking in surgical video AI.