# Learning Motion Flows for Semi-supervised Instrument Segmentation from Robotic Surgical Video

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.02501 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02501/

## Key facts

- Cited by 35 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [SurgicalSAM: Efficient Class Promptable Surgical Instrument Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08746/) (2023)
- [Trans-SVNet: Accurate Phase Recognition from Surgical Videos via Hybrid Embedding Aggregation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09712/) (2021)
- [TraSeTR: Track-to-Segment Transformer with Contrastive Query for Instance-level Instrument Segmentation in Robotic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08453/) (2022)
- [MATIS: Masked-Attention Transformers for Surgical Instrument Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09514/) (2023)
- [From Forks to Forceps: A New Framework for Instance Segmentation of Surgical Instruments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16200/) (2022)
- [Exploring Intra- and Inter-Video Relation for Surgical Semantic Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15251/) (2022)
- [FUN-SIS: a Fully UNsupervised approach for Surgical Instrument Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08141/) (2022)
- [Methods and datasets for segmentation of minimally invasive surgical instruments in endoscopic images and videos: A review of the state of the art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13014/) (2023)
- [A spatio-temporal network for video semantic segmentation in surgical videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11052/) (2023)
- [One to Many: Adaptive Instrument Segmentation via Meta Learning and Dynamic Online Adaptation in Robotic Surgical Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12988/) (2021)
- [Biomedical SAM 2: Segment Anything in Biomedical Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03286/) (2024)
- [ASI-Seg: Audio-Driven Surgical Instrument Segmentation with Surgeon Intention Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19435/) (2024)
- [SANGRIA: Surgical Video Scene Graph Optimization for Surgical Workflow Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20214/) (2024)
- [Efficient Global-Local Memory for Real-time Instrument Segmentation of Robotic Surgical Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13593/) (2021)
- [SurgicalPart-SAM: Part-to-Whole Collaborative Prompting for Surgical Instrument Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14481/) (2023)
- [Surgical-DeSAM: Decoupling SAM for Instrument Segmentation in Robotic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14040/) (2024)
- [Integrating Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality in Robotic Surgery: An Initial dVRK Study Using a Surgical Education Scenario](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00383/) (2022)
- [Temporally Constrained Neural Networks (TCNN): A framework for semi-supervised video semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13815/) (2021)
- [SegMatch: A semi-supervised learning method for surgical instrument segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05232/) (2023)
- [Systematic Evaluation and Guidelines for Segment Anything Model in Surgical Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00525/) (2024)
- [Pseudo-label Guided Cross-video Pixel Contrast for Robotic Surgical Scene Segmentation with Limited Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09664/) (2022)
- [Spatio-Temporal Representation Decoupling and Enhancement for Federated Instrument Segmentation in Surgical Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23759/) (2025)
- [A comprehensive survey on recent deep learning-based methods applied to surgical data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01435/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Surgical Instrument Segmentation Without Human Intervention: A Graph Partitioning View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14789/) (2024)
- [EgoSurgery-HTS: A Dataset for Egocentric Hand-Tool Segmentation in Open Surgery Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18755/) (2025)
- [SAF-IS: a Spatial Annotation Free Framework for Instance Segmentation of Surgical Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01723/) (2023)
- [Rethinking RGB-D Fusion for Semantic Segmentation in Surgical Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19714/) (2024)
- [Surgical Video Understanding with Label Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18802/) (2025)
- [Active Learning for Efficient Annotation of Surgical Videos with Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13237/) (2026)
- [Motion-Corrected Moving Average: Including Post-Hoc Temporal Information for Improved Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03120/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Performing low hertz labeling for surgical videos at intervals can greatly releases the burden of surgeons. In this paper, we study the semi-supervised instrument segmentation from robotic surgical videos with sparse annotations. Unlike most previous methods using unlabeled frames individually, we propose a dual motion based method to wisely learn motion flows for segmentation enhancement by leveraging temporal dynamics. We firstly design a flow predictor to derive the motion for jointly propagating the frame-label pairs given the current labeled frame. Considering the fast instrument motion, we further introduce a flow compensator to estimate intermediate motion within continuous frames, with a novel cycle learning strategy. By exploiting generated data pairs, our framework can recover and even enhance temporal consistency of training sequences to benefit segmentation. We validate our framework with binary, part, and type tasks on 2017 MICCAI EndoVis Robotic Instrument Segmentation Challenge dataset. Results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods by a large margin, and even exceeds fully supervised training on two tasks.