# Surgical Temporal Action-aware Network with Sequence Regularization for Phase Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.12603 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12603/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [MS-TCN: Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Network for Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01945/) (2019)
- [EndoNet: A Deep Architecture for Recognition Tasks on Laparoscopic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03012/) (2016)
- [TeCNO: Surgical Phase Recognition with Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10751/) (2020)
- [Surgical Data Science -- from Concepts toward Clinical Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02284/) (2020)
- [Trans-SVNet: Accurate Phase Recognition from Surgical Videos via Hybrid Embedding Aggregation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09712/) (2021)
- [Multi-Task Recurrent Convolutional Network with Correlation Loss for Surgical Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06099/) (2019)
- [Temporal Memory Relation Network for Workflow Recognition from Surgical Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16327/) (2021)
- [OperA: Attention-Regularized Transformers for Surgical Phase Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03873/) (2021)
- [Using 3D Convolutional Neural Networks to Learn Spatiotemporal Features for Automatic Surgical Gesture Recognition in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11454/) (2019)
- [Less is More: Surgical Phase Recognition from Timestamp Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08199/) (2022)
- [Free Lunch for Surgical Video Understanding by Distilling Self-Supervisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09292/) (2022)
- [Retrieval of surgical phase transitions using reinforcement learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00902/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [ASI-Seg: Audio-Driven Surgical Instrument Segmentation with Surgeon Intention Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19435/) (2024)
- [SurgPLAN++: Universal Surgical Phase Localization Network for Online and Offline Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12467/) (2024)
- [Advancing Embodied Intelligence in Robotic-Assisted Endovascular Procedures: A Systematic Review of AI Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15327/) (2025)
- [SurgTrack: CAD-Free 3D Tracking of Real-world Surgical Instruments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02598/) (2024)
- [Long-tailed Medical Diagnosis with Relation-aware Representation Learning and Iterative Classifier Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03238/) (2025)
- [SurgVisAgent: Multimodal Agentic Model for Versatile Surgical Visual Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02252/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To assist surgeons in the operating theatre, surgical phase recognition is critical for developing computer-assisted surgical systems, which requires comprehensive understanding of surgical videos. Although existing studies made great progress, there are still two significant limitations worthy of improvement. First, due to the compromise of resource consumption, frame-wise visual features are extracted by 2D networks and disregard spatial and temporal knowledge of surgical actions, which hinders subsequent inter-frame modeling for phase prediction. Second, these works simply utilize ordinary classification loss with one-hot phase labels to optimize the phase predictions, and cannot fully explore surgical videos under inadequate supervision. To overcome these two limitations, we propose a Surgical Temporal Action-aware Network with sequence Regularization, named STAR-Net, to recognize surgical phases more accurately from input videos. Specifically, we propose an efficient multi-scale surgical temporal action (MS-STA) module, which integrates visual features with spatial and temporal knowledge of surgical actions at the cost of 2D networks. Moreover, we devise the dual-classifier sequence regularization (DSR) to facilitate the training of STAR-Net by the sequence guidance of an auxiliary classifier with a smaller capacity. Our STAR-Net with MS-STA and DSR can exploit visual features of surgical actions with effective regularization, thereby leading to the superior performance of surgical phase recognition. Extensive experiments on a large-scale gastrectomy surgery dataset and the public Cholec80 benchmark prove that our STAR-Net significantly outperforms state-of-the-arts of surgical phase recognition.