Looking Beyond the Scale: Do Surgical Skill Models Learn Transferable Representations Across Assessment Rubrics?
Vision-based surgical skill assessment has shown strong in-domain results, yet a fundamental question remains unasked: do these models learn transferable representations of surgical proficiency, or do they merely encode dataset-specific visual patterns? This paper systematically analyzes what limits cross-domain skill transfer between the GOALS and OSATS assessment scales using the LASANA and JIGSAWS datasets. Each evaluated method serves a targeted diagnostic purpose: end-to-end training to test whether supervised skill learning transfers directly, Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization (ASAM) to probe whether flatter loss landscapes improve generalization, and augmentation-based self-supervised and contrastive learning to assess whether domain-invariant pretraining decouples skill from visual context. Transfer is evaluated in both directions using a disjoint-participant held-out test set for JIGSAWS. Results reveal an asymmetry: backbones pretrained on JIGSAWS achieve CCC values of 0.77 to 0.80 on LASANA, closely matching the end-to-end baseline, showing cross-rubric transfer is feasible when the target domain provides consistent supervision. Transfer to JIGSAWS fails across all methods, likely due to annotation inconsistencies. Control experiments with a Kinetics-pretrained backbone suggest task-specific heads carry the majority of the skill prediction burden, while the backbone need only provide adequate spatiotemporal features. These findings offer a new perspective on vision-based skill assessment: the central question of whether skill representations transfer across scoring systems has not been previously investigated. Results indicate the visual component is dominant but not solely responsible for skill prediction; further work is needed to conclusively disentangle transferable skill features from those bound to a specific visual domain.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Contrastive LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Deep Neural Networks for the Assessment of Surgical Skills: A Systematic Review
Surgical training in medical school residency programs has followed the apprenticeship model. The learning and assessment process is inherently subjective and time-consuming. Thus, there is a need for objective methods t…
Beyond Instrument Motion: Recognizing Tissue Tension Toward Surgical Skill Assessment
Surgical performance assessment in minimally invasive surgery largely relies on manual expert review, making it time-consuming, subjective, and difficult to scale. While existing surgical video understanding methods addr…
Surgical phase recognitionAction RecognitionFrom Multimodal Observation to Interpretable Suggestions: Counterfactual Time-Expanded Relational Modeling of Surgical Teams
In surgery, patient safety is threatened not only by technical issues but also by poor teamwork. However, existing surgical AI-based solutions focus mainly on visual workflow and technical execution, neglecting the model…
Explainable AI-Powered Framework for Video-Based Skill Assessment in Cataract Surgery
Persistent shortages in the surgical workforce and inherent limitations of traditional training methods highlight the necessity of automated, data-driven approaches in surgical education. This study addresses these chall…
Real-time Informative Surgical Skill Assessment with Gaussian Process Learning
Endoscopic Sinus and Skull Base Surgeries (ESSBSs) is a challenging and potentially dangerous surgical procedure, and objective skill assessment is the key components to improve the effectiveness of surgical training, to…