Beyond Instrument Motion: Recognizing Tissue Tension Toward Surgical Skill Assessment

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17935v2
• Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2026 08:27:29 GMT
• Title: Beyond Instrument Motion: Recognizing Tissue Tension Toward Surgical Skill Assessment
• Abstract summary: We introduce tissue tension recognition, a new clinically motivated video understanding task for laparoscopic and robot-assisted rectal cancer surgery.<n>To support this task, we construct SurgTension, the first expert-annotated tissue tension dataset.<n>We also propose TensionTRAC, a lightweight trajectory-based framework that models tissue tension from sparse point trajectories.
• Score: 36.50919068544186
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: 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 address tasks such as instrument segmentation, surgical phase recognition, and action recognition, they do not explicitly capture fine-grained tissue handling, a key indicator of surgical quality. To address this gap, we introduce tissue tension recognition, a new clinically motivated video understanding task for laparoscopic and robot-assisted rectal cancer surgery. To support this task, we construct SurgTension, the first expert-annotated tissue tension dataset, providing a benchmark for objective tissue tension recognition. We further propose TensionTRAC, a lightweight trajectory-based framework that models tissue tension from sparse point trajectories. Using a compact trajectory encoder, TensionTRAC achieves competitive performance against strong pretrained video backbones.

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