# Symmetric Dilated Convolution for Surgical Gesture Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.06373 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06373/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Trans-SVNet: Accurate Phase Recognition from Surgical Videos via Hybrid Embedding Aggregation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09712/) (2021)
- [Gesture Recognition in Robotic Surgery: a Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00027/) (2021)
- [Efficient Global-Local Memory for Real-time Instrument Segmentation of Robotic Surgical Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13593/) (2021)
- [Surgical Instruction Generation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06964/) (2021)
- [GLSFormer: Gated - Long, Short Sequence Transformer for Step Recognition in Surgical Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11081/) (2023)
- [SEDMamba: Enhancing Selective State Space Modelling with Bottleneck Mechanism and Fine-to-Coarse Temporal Fusion for Efficient Error Detection in Robot-Assisted Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15920/) (2024)
- [ETSM: Automating Dissection Trajectory Suggestion and Confidence Map-Based Safety Margin Prediction for Robot-assisted Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18884/) (2024)
- [Learning Invariant Representation of Tasks for Robust Surgical State Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09119/) (2021)
- [Learning dissection trajectories from expert surgical videos via imitation learning with equivariant diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04716/) (2025)
- [Human Gaze Guided Attention for Surgical Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04752/) (2022)
- [Zero-shot Prompt-based Video Encoder for Surgical Gesture Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19786/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic surgical gesture recognition is a prerequisite of intra-operative computer assistance and objective surgical skill assessment. Prior works either require additional sensors to collect kinematics data or have limitations on capturing temporal information from long and untrimmed surgical videos. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel temporal convolutional architecture to automatically detect and segment surgical gestures with corresponding boundaries only using RGB videos. We devise our method with a symmetric dilation structure bridged by a self-attention module to encode and decode the long-term temporal patterns and establish the frame-to-frame relationship accordingly. We validate the effectiveness of our approach on a fundamental robotic suturing task from the JIGSAWS dataset. The experiment results demonstrate the ability of our method on capturing long-term frame dependencies, which largely outperform the state-of-the-art methods on the frame-wise accuracy up to ~6 points and the F1@50 score ~6 points.