GP-VLS: A general-purpose vision language model for surgery
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Medical vision-language models
Abstract (arXiv)
Surgery requires comprehensive medical knowledge, visual assessment skills, and procedural expertise. While recent surgical AI models have focused on solving task-specific problems, there is a need for general-purpose systems that can understand surgical scenes and interact through natural language. This paper introduces GP-VLS, a general-purpose vision language model for surgery that integrates medical and surgical knowledge with visual scene understanding. For comprehensively evaluating general-purpose surgical models, we propose SurgiQual, which evaluates across medical and surgical knowledge benchmarks as well as surgical vision-language questions. To train GP-VLS, we develop six new datasets spanning medical knowledge, surgical textbooks, and vision-language pairs for tasks like phase recognition and tool identification. We show that GP-VLS significantly outperforms existing open- and closed-source models on surgical vision-language tasks, with 8-21% improvements in accuracy across SurgiQual benchmarks. GP-VLS also demonstrates strong performance on medical and surgical knowledge tests compared to open-source alternatives. Overall, GP-VLS provides an open-source foundation for developing AI assistants to support surgeons across a wide range of tasks and scenarios. The code and data for this work is publicly available at gpvls-surgery-vlm.github.io.
Key facts. Cited by 16 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 51 of its 59 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2024.
Builds on
51 of 59 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2024Surgical-LVLM: Learning to Adapt Large Vision-Language Model for Grounded Visual Question Answering in Robotic Surgery22 Mar
- 2022RoentGen: Vision-Language Foundation Model for Chest X-ray Generation23 Nov
Other references · 49
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- 2023Surgical Gym: A high-performance GPU-based platform for reinforcement learning with surgical robotscited by 5
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 2; 2025: 9; 2026: 5.
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4 more
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- 2026SurgNarrator: A Generative Retrieval Framework for Surgical Video Understanding5 Aug 2026
- 2026RoboSurg-VQA: A Multimodal Benchmark for Surgical Segmentation-Aware Visual Question Answering21 May 2026
- 2026Towards Next-Generation Healthcare: A Survey of Medical Embodied AI for Perception, Decision-Making, and Action5 Apr 2026
- 2026Chain-of-Adaptation: Surgical Vision-Language Adaptation with Reinforcement Learning20 Mar 2026
- 2026Evaluating Large Vision-language Models for Surgical Tool Detection23 Jan 2026
- 2025Generating Natural-Language Surgical Feedback: From Structured Representation to Domain-Grounded Evaluation19 Nov 2025
- 2025Multi-scale Temporal Prediction via Incremental Generation and Multi-agent Collaboration22 Sep 2025
- 2025EyePCR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Fine-Grained Perception, Knowledge Comprehension and Clinical Reasoning in Ophthalmic Surgery19 Sep 2025
- 2025Leveraging Generic Foundation Models for Multimodal Surgical Data Analysis8 Sep 2025
- 2025SurgiSR4K: A High-Resolution Endoscopic Video Dataset for Robotic-Assisted Minimally Invasive Procedures30 Jun 2025
- 2025SurgVidLM: Towards Multi-grained Surgical Video Understanding with Large Language Model22 Jun 2025
- 2025EndoBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Multi-Modal Large Language Models for Endoscopy Analysis29 May 2025
4 more
- 2025Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models: Concepts, Progress, Applications and Challenges7 May 2025
- 2025Surgical Scene Understanding in the Era of Foundation AI Models: A Comprehensive Review16 Feb 2025
- 2024OphCLIP: Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Learning for Ophthalmic Surgical Video-Language Pretraining23 Nov 2024
- 2024CoPESD: A Multi-Level Surgical Motion Dataset for Training Large Vision-Language Models to Co-Pilot Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection10 Oct 2024
- 2025Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models: Concepts, Progress, Applications and Challengescited by 72
- 2024OphCLIP: Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Learning for Ophthalmic Surgical Video-Language Pretrainingcited by 29
- 2024CoPESD: A Multi-Level Surgical Motion Dataset for Training Large Vision-Language Models to Co-Pilot Endoscopic Submucosal Dissectioncited by 15
- 2025EndoBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Multi-Modal Large Language Models for Endoscopy Analysiscited by 13
- 2026Evaluating Large Vision-language Models for Surgical Tool Detectioncited by 1
- 2026Evaluating Large Vision-language Models for Surgical Tool Detection23 Jan 2026
- 2025EndoBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Multi-Modal Large Language Models for Endoscopy Analysis29 May 2025
- 2025Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Models: Concepts, Progress, Applications and Challenges7 May 2025
- 2024OphCLIP: Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Learning for Ophthalmic Surgical Video-Language Pretraining23 Nov 2024
- 2024CoPESD: A Multi-Level Surgical Motion Dataset for Training Large Vision-Language Models to Co-Pilot Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection10 Oct 2024
- 2025SurgVidLM: Towards Multi-grained Surgical Video Understanding with Large Language Modelcited by 13
- 2025Surgical Scene Understanding in the Era of Foundation AI Models: A Comprehensive Reviewcited by 8
- 2025SurgiSR4K: A High-Resolution Endoscopic Video Dataset for Robotic-Assisted Minimally Invasive Procedurescited by 2
- 2026Towards Next-Generation Healthcare: A Survey of Medical Embodied AI for Perception, Decision-Making, and Actioncited by 2
- 2025Leveraging Generic Foundation Models for Multimodal Surgical Data Analysiscited by 0
- 2025Generating Natural-Language Surgical Feedback: From Structured Representation to Domain-Grounded Evaluationcited by 0
- 2026Chain-of-Adaptation: Surgical Vision-Language Adaptation with Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
- 2026RoboSurg-VQA: A Multimodal Benchmark for Surgical Segmentation-Aware Visual Question Answeringcited by 0
- 2026SurgNarrator: A Generative Retrieval Framework for Surgical Video Understandingcited by 0
- 2026SurgNarrator: A Generative Retrieval Framework for Surgical Video Understanding5 Aug 2026
- 2026RoboSurg-VQA: A Multimodal Benchmark for Surgical Segmentation-Aware Visual Question Answering21 May 2026
- 2026Towards Next-Generation Healthcare: A Survey of Medical Embodied AI for Perception, Decision-Making, and Action5 Apr 2026
- 2026Chain-of-Adaptation: Surgical Vision-Language Adaptation with Reinforcement Learning20 Mar 2026
- 2025Generating Natural-Language Surgical Feedback: From Structured Representation to Domain-Grounded Evaluation19 Nov 2025
- 2025Leveraging Generic Foundation Models for Multimodal Surgical Data Analysis8 Sep 2025
- 2025SurgiSR4K: A High-Resolution Endoscopic Video Dataset for Robotic-Assisted Minimally Invasive Procedures30 Jun 2025
- 2025SurgVidLM: Towards Multi-grained Surgical Video Understanding with Large Language Model22 Jun 2025
- 2025Surgical Scene Understanding in the Era of Foundation AI Models: A Comprehensive Review16 Feb 2025
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- 2025Can DeepSeek Reason Like a Surgeon? An Empirical Evaluation for Vision-Language Understanding in Robotic-Assisted Surgery
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