Looking Beyond the Scale: Do Surgical Skill Models Learn Transferable Representations Across Assessment Rubrics?

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17519v1
• Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:44:31 GMT
• Title: Looking Beyond the Scale: Do Surgical Skill Models Learn Transferable Representations Across Assessment Rubrics?
• Abstract summary: This paper systematically analyzes what limits cross-domain skill transfer between the GOALSATS and JIGSAWS scales.<n> backbones pretrained on JIGSAWS achieve CCC values of 0.77 to 0.80 on LASANA, closely matching the end-to-end baseline.<n>Results indicate the visual component is dominant but not solely responsible for skill prediction; further work is needed to conclusively disentangle skill features from those bound to a specific visual domain.
• Score: 1.6803183521876386
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: 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.

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