A benchmark of methods for surgical instrument segmentation in endoscopic pituitary surgery - Summary - MDSpire

A benchmark of methods for surgical instrument segmentation in endoscopic pituitary surgery

  • By

  • Kendall Feeny

  • Anjana Wijekoon

  • Wenhua Wei

  • Danyal Zaman Khan

  • Danail Stoyanov

  • Hani J. Marcus

  • Sophia Bano

  • May 21, 2026

  • 0 min

Share

Objective:

To benchmark established multi-class semantic instrument segmentation models using an in-patient dataset from endoscopic transsphenoidal approach (eTSA) pituitary surgery, highlighting the importance of accurate segmentation in surgical outcomes.

Key Findings:
  • Class-wise performance varied significantly, with frequent classes performing better, indicating potential areas for targeted training.
  • Convolutional architectures performed poorly, particularly in classes with fewer occurrences, suggesting a need for improved model designs.
  • EoMT achieved the highest and most balanced performance among the models, indicating its potential for clinical application.
Interpretation:

Transformer architectures outperformed convolutional ones, emphasizing the critical role of global context and spatial information in enhancing segmentation accuracy.

Limitations:
  • Performance was reduced for classes with fewer occurrences and less distinct appearances, which may limit the model's applicability in diverse surgical settings.
  • The dataset may not fully represent the diversity of surgical instruments used, potentially affecting the generalizability of the findings.
Conclusion:

The study benchmarks six models on a new dataset, indicating the need for future work to enhance performance through techniques like temporal modeling, dataset expansion, and exploring hybrid model architectures.

Original Source(s)

Related Content