Text Promptable Surgical Instrument Segmentation with Vision-Language Models
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Medical vision-language models
Abstract (arXiv)
In this paper, we propose a novel text promptable surgical instrument segmentation approach to overcome challenges associated with diversity and differentiation of surgical instruments in minimally invasive surgeries. We redefine the task as text promptable, thereby enabling a more nuanced comprehension of surgical instruments and adaptability to new instrument types. Inspired by recent advancements in vision-language models, we leverage pretrained image and text encoders as our model backbone and design a text promptable mask decoder consisting of attention- and convolution-based prompting schemes for surgical instrument segmentation prediction. Our model leverages multiple text prompts for each surgical instrument through a new mixture of prompts mechanism, resulting in enhanced segmentation performance. Additionally, we introduce a hard instrument area reinforcement module to improve image feature comprehension and segmentation precision. Extensive experiments on several surgical instrument segmentation datasets demonstrate our model's superior performance and promising generalization capability. To our knowledge, this is the first implementation of a promptable approach to surgical instrument segmentation, offering significant potential for practical application in the field of robotic-assisted surgery. Code is available at https://github.com/franciszzj/TP-SIS.
Key facts. Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 44 of its 55 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2023.
Builds on
44 of 55 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 9; 2025: 9; 2026: 7.
27 papers.
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- 2024Image Segmentation in Foundation Model Era: A Surveycited by 35
- 2024OphCLIP: Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Learning for Ophthalmic Surgical Video-Language Pretrainingcited by 29
- 2025MM-OR: A Large Multimodal Operating Room Dataset for Semantic Understanding of High-Intensity Surgical Environmentscited by 28
- 2024CholecInstanceSeg: A Tool Instance Segmentation Dataset for Laparoscopic Surgerycited by 16
- 2025ReSurgSAM2: Referring Segment Anything in Surgical Video via Credible Long-term Trackingcited by 15
- 2025SurgVidLM: Towards Multi-grained Surgical Video Understanding with Large Language Modelcited by 13
- 2023VLPrompt: Vision-Language Prompting for Panoptic Scene Graph Generationcited by 12
- 2025Taming Vision-Language Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Reviewcited by 9
- 2023SurgicalPart-SAM: Part-to-Whole Collaborative Prompting for Surgical Instrument Segmentationcited by 8
- 2024Augmenting Efficient Real-time Surgical Instrument Segmentation in Video with Point Tracking and Segment Anythingcited by 7
- 2025SurgTPGS: Semantic 3D Surgical Scene Understanding with Text Promptable Gaussian Splattingcited by 7
- 2025Comparative validation of surgical phase recognition, instrument keypoint estimation, and instrument instance segmentation in endoscopy: Results of the PhaKIR 2024 challengecited by 6
15 more
- 2024Personalizing Federated Instrument Segmentation with Visual Trait Priors in Robotic Surgerycited by 2
- 2024Segment as You Wish -- Free-Form Language-Based Segmentation for Medical Imagescited by 2
- 2025SCOPE: Speech-guided COllaborative PErception Framework for Surgical Scene Segmentationcited by 1
- 2026An Approach to Enriching Surgical Video Datasets for Fine-Grained Spatial-Temporal Understanding of Vision-Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026Hierarchical Prototype-Memory Adaptation of SAM for Surgical Instrument Segmentationcited by 1
- 2024Unity in Diversity: Multi-expert Knowledge Confrontation and Collaboration for Generalizable Vehicle Re-identificationcited by 0
- 2024Bootstrapping Vision-language Models for Self-supervised Remote Physiological Measurementcited by 0
- 2024Rethinking Text-Promptable Surgical Instrument Segmentation with Robust Frameworkcited by 0
- 2025SurgPIS: Surgical-instrument-level Instances and Part-level Semantics for Weakly-supervised Part-aware Instance Segmentationcited by 0
- 2025ReMeDI: Refined Memory for Disambiguation of Identities with SAM3 in Surgical Segmentationcited by 0
- 2026VLM-Guided Iterative Refinement for Surgical Image Segmentation with Foundation Modelscited by 0
- 2026Toward Mask Annotation-Free Surgical Instrument Segmentation from Endoscopic Images Using Text-Prompted Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3)cited by 0
- 2026Bootstrapping Vision-Language Model for Hysteroscopic Surgical Scene Segmentationcited by 0
- 2026SIRA: Reasoning-Aware Surgical Instrument Segmentation via Query-Anchored Alignmentcited by 0
- 2026LD-RSVIS: A Large-Scale and Diverse Benchmark for Referring Surgical Video Instrument Segmentationcited by 0
- 2026LD-RSVIS: A Large-Scale and Diverse Benchmark for Referring Surgical Video Instrument Segmentation19 Sep 2026
- 2026SIRA: Reasoning-Aware Surgical Instrument Segmentation via Query-Anchored Alignment18 Sep 2026
- 2026Hierarchical Prototype-Memory Adaptation of SAM for Surgical Instrument Segmentation25 Aug 2026
- 2026Bootstrapping Vision-Language Model for Hysteroscopic Surgical Scene Segmentation10 Aug 2026
- 2026Toward Mask Annotation-Free Surgical Instrument Segmentation from Endoscopic Images Using Text-Prompted Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3)9 Aug 2026
- 2026An Approach to Enriching Surgical Video Datasets for Fine-Grained Spatial-Temporal Understanding of Vision-Language Models1 Apr 2026
- 2026VLM-Guided Iterative Refinement for Surgical Image Segmentation with Foundation Models9 Feb 2026
- 2025ReMeDI: Refined Memory for Disambiguation of Identities with SAM3 in Surgical Segmentation18 Dec 2025
- 2025SCOPE: Speech-guided COllaborative PErception Framework for Surgical Scene Segmentation12 Sep 2025
- 2025SurgPIS: Surgical-instrument-level Instances and Part-level Semantics for Weakly-supervised Part-aware Instance Segmentation25 Jul 2025
- 2025Comparative validation of surgical phase recognition, instrument keypoint estimation, and instrument instance segmentation in endoscopy: Results of the PhaKIR 2024 challenge22 Jul 2025
- 2025SurgTPGS: Semantic 3D Surgical Scene Understanding with Text Promptable Gaussian Splatting29 Jun 2025
15 more
- 2025Taming Vision-Language Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Review23 Jun 2025
- 2025SurgVidLM: Towards Multi-grained Surgical Video Understanding with Large Language Model22 Jun 2025
- 2025ReSurgSAM2: Referring Segment Anything in Surgical Video via Credible Long-term Tracking13 May 2025
- 2025MM-OR: A Large Multimodal Operating Room Dataset for Semantic Understanding of High-Intensity Surgical Environments4 Mar 2025
- 2024OphCLIP: Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Learning for Ophthalmic Surgical Video-Language Pretraining23 Nov 2024
- 2024Rethinking Text-Promptable Surgical Instrument Segmentation with Robust Framework19 Nov 2024
- 2024Segment as You Wish -- Free-Form Language-Based Segmentation for Medical Images2 Oct 2024
- 2024Image Segmentation in Foundation Model Era: A Survey23 Aug 2024
- 2024Personalizing Federated Instrument Segmentation with Visual Trait Priors in Robotic Surgery6 Aug 2024
- 2024Bootstrapping Vision-language Models for Self-supervised Remote Physiological Measurement11 Jul 2024
- 2024Unity in Diversity: Multi-expert Knowledge Confrontation and Collaboration for Generalizable Vehicle Re-identification10 Jul 2024
- 2024CholecInstanceSeg: A Tool Instance Segmentation Dataset for Laparoscopic Surgery23 Jun 2024
- 2024Augmenting Efficient Real-time Surgical Instrument Segmentation in Video with Point Tracking and Segment Anything12 Mar 2024
- 2023SurgicalPart-SAM: Part-to-Whole Collaborative Prompting for Surgical Instrument Segmentation22 Dec 2023
- 2023VLPrompt: Vision-Language Prompting for Panoptic Scene Graph Generation27 Nov 2023
- 2024OphCLIP: Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Learning for Ophthalmic Surgical Video-Language Pretrainingcited by 29
- 2025Taming Vision-Language Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Reviewcited by 9
- 2025SurgTPGS: Semantic 3D Surgical Scene Understanding with Text Promptable Gaussian Splattingcited by 7
- 2026An Approach to Enriching Surgical Video Datasets for Fine-Grained Spatial-Temporal Understanding of Vision-Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026Bootstrapping Vision-Language Model for Hysteroscopic Surgical Scene Segmentationcited by 0
- 2026Bootstrapping Vision-Language Model for Hysteroscopic Surgical Scene Segmentation10 Aug 2026
- 2026An Approach to Enriching Surgical Video Datasets for Fine-Grained Spatial-Temporal Understanding of Vision-Language Models1 Apr 2026
- 2025SurgTPGS: Semantic 3D Surgical Scene Understanding with Text Promptable Gaussian Splatting29 Jun 2025
- 2025Taming Vision-Language Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Review23 Jun 2025
- 2024OphCLIP: Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Learning for Ophthalmic Surgical Video-Language Pretraining23 Nov 2024
- 2024Image Segmentation in Foundation Model Era: A Surveycited by 35
- 2024Image Segmentation in Foundation Model Era: A Survey23 Aug 2024
- 2025MM-OR: A Large Multimodal Operating Room Dataset for Semantic Understanding of High-Intensity Surgical Environmentscited by 28
- 2024CholecInstanceSeg: A Tool Instance Segmentation Dataset for Laparoscopic Surgerycited by 16
- 2025ReSurgSAM2: Referring Segment Anything in Surgical Video via Credible Long-term Trackingcited by 15
- 2025SurgVidLM: Towards Multi-grained Surgical Video Understanding with Large Language Modelcited by 13
- 2023VLPrompt: Vision-Language Prompting for Panoptic Scene Graph Generationcited by 12
- 2023SurgicalPart-SAM: Part-to-Whole Collaborative Prompting for Surgical Instrument Segmentationcited by 8
- 2024Augmenting Efficient Real-time Surgical Instrument Segmentation in Video with Point Tracking and Segment Anythingcited by 7
- 2025Comparative validation of surgical phase recognition, instrument keypoint estimation, and instrument instance segmentation in endoscopy: Results of the PhaKIR 2024 challengecited by 6
- 2024Personalizing Federated Instrument Segmentation with Visual Trait Priors in Robotic Surgerycited by 2
- 2024Segment as You Wish -- Free-Form Language-Based Segmentation for Medical Imagescited by 2
- 2025SCOPE: Speech-guided COllaborative PErception Framework for Surgical Scene Segmentationcited by 1
- 2026Hierarchical Prototype-Memory Adaptation of SAM for Surgical Instrument Segmentationcited by 1
12 most cited of 21 All 21 (JSON)
- 2026LD-RSVIS: A Large-Scale and Diverse Benchmark for Referring Surgical Video Instrument Segmentation19 Sep 2026
- 2026SIRA: Reasoning-Aware Surgical Instrument Segmentation via Query-Anchored Alignment18 Sep 2026
- 2026Hierarchical Prototype-Memory Adaptation of SAM for Surgical Instrument Segmentation25 Aug 2026
- 2026Toward Mask Annotation-Free Surgical Instrument Segmentation from Endoscopic Images Using Text-Prompted Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3)9 Aug 2026
- 2026VLM-Guided Iterative Refinement for Surgical Image Segmentation with Foundation Models9 Feb 2026
- 2025ReMeDI: Refined Memory for Disambiguation of Identities with SAM3 in Surgical Segmentation18 Dec 2025
- 2025SCOPE: Speech-guided COllaborative PErception Framework for Surgical Scene Segmentation12 Sep 2025
- 2025SurgPIS: Surgical-instrument-level Instances and Part-level Semantics for Weakly-supervised Part-aware Instance Segmentation25 Jul 2025
- 2025Comparative validation of surgical phase recognition, instrument keypoint estimation, and instrument instance segmentation in endoscopy: Results of the PhaKIR 2024 challenge22 Jul 2025
- 2025SurgVidLM: Towards Multi-grained Surgical Video Understanding with Large Language Model22 Jun 2025
- 2025ReSurgSAM2: Referring Segment Anything in Surgical Video via Credible Long-term Tracking13 May 2025
- 2025MM-OR: A Large Multimodal Operating Room Dataset for Semantic Understanding of High-Intensity Surgical Environments4 Mar 2025
12 newest of 21 All 21 (JSON)
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- 2026GroundedSurg: A Multi-Procedure Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Surgical Tool Segmentation
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- 2026TrajPred: Trajectory-Conditioned Joint Embedding Prediction for Surgical Instrument-Tissue Interaction Recognition in Vision-Language Models
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