# Temporal coherence-based self-supervised learning for laparoscopic workflow analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.06811 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06811/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jun 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Rendezvous: Attention Mechanisms for the Recognition of Surgical Action Triplets in Endoscopic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03223/) (2021)
- [Learning Multi-modal Representations by Watching Hundreds of Surgical Video Lectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15220/) (2023)
- [Dissecting Self-Supervised Learning Methods for Surgical Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00449/) (2022)
- [CholecTriplet2021: A benchmark challenge for surgical action triplet recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04746/) (2022)
- [Rendezvous in Time: An Attention-based Temporal Fusion approach for Surgical Triplet Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16963/) (2022)
- [Data Splits and Metrics for Method Benchmarking on Surgical Action Triplet Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05235/) (2022)
- [CholecTriplet2022: Show me a tool and tell me the triplet -- an endoscopic vision challenge for surgical action triplet detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06294/) (2023)
- [Jumpstarting Surgical Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05968/) (2023)
- [Reducing Annotating Load: Active Learning with Synthetic Images in Surgical Instrument Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03534/) (2021)
- [TUNeS: A Temporal U-Net with Self-Attention for Video-based Surgical Phase Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09997/) (2023)
- [Adaptation of Surgical Activity Recognition Models Across Operating Rooms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03083/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Temporal Convolutional Networks for Fine-grained Surgical Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10834/) (2023)
- [Live Laparoscopic Video Retrieval with Compressed Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04301/) (2022)
- [Deep-Learning-Assisted Analysis of Cataract Surgery Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05900/) (2023)
- [State-Change Learning for Prediction of Future Events in Endoscopic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12904/) (2025)
- [SPIRIT: Spatio-temporal Pairwise Relational Modeling of Instrument-Tissue Interactions for Surgical Action Triplet Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02188/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In order to provide the right type of assistance at the right time, computer-assisted surgery systems need context awareness. To achieve this, methods for surgical workflow analysis are crucial. Currently, convolutional neural networks provide the best performance for video-based workflow analysis tasks. For training such networks, large amounts of annotated data are necessary. However, collecting a sufficient amount of data is often costly, time-consuming, and not always feasible. In this paper, we address this problem by presenting and comparing different approaches for self-supervised pretraining of neural networks on unlabeled laparoscopic videos using temporal coherence. We evaluate our pretrained networks on Cholec80, a publicly available dataset for surgical phase segmentation, on which a maximum F1 score of 84.6 was reached. Furthermore, we were able to achieve an increase of the F1 score of up to 10 points when compared to a non-pretrained neural network.