# Meta-SurDiff: Classification Diffusion Model Optimized by Meta Learning is Reliable for Online Surgical Phase Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14181 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14181/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 29 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Medical imaging and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/medical-imaging-and-segmentation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [EndoNet: A Deep Architecture for Recognition Tasks on Laparoscopic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03012/) (2016)
- [Expanding Language-Image Pretrained Models for General Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02816/) (2022)
- [TeCNO: Surgical Phase Recognition with Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10751/) (2020)
- [CARD: Classification and Regression Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07275/) (2022)
- [Trans-SVNet: Accurate Phase Recognition from Surgical Videos via Hybrid Embedding Aggregation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09712/) (2021)
- [AutoLaparo: A New Dataset of Integrated Multi-tasks for Image-guided Surgical Automation in Laparoscopic Hysterectomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02049/) (2022)
- [Non-autoregressive Conditional Diffusion Models for Time Series Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05043/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Real-time Online Video Detection with Temporal Smoothing Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09236/) (2022)
- [LoViT: Long Video Transformer for Surgical Phase Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08989/) (2023)
- [Towards Unified Surgical Skill Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01035/) (2021)
- [OphNet: A Large-Scale Video Benchmark for Ophthalmic Surgical Workflow Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07471/) (2024)
- [Contextual Dropout: An Efficient Sample-Dependent Dropout Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04181/) (2021)
- [Exploring Segment-level Semantics for Online Phase Recognition from Surgical Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11044/) (2021)
- [Learning to Re-weight Examples with Optimal Transport for Imbalanced Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02951/) (2022)
- [Not End-to-End: Explore Multi-Stage Architecture for Online Surgical Phase Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04810/) (2021)
- [On the Pitfalls of Batch Normalization for End-to-End Video Learning: A Study on Surgical Workflow Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07976/) (2022)
- [SPRMamba: Surgical Phase Recognition for Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection with Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12108/) (2024)
- [SurgPLAN++: Universal Surgical Phase Localization Network for Online and Offline Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12467/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Online surgical phase recognition has drawn great attention most recently due to its potential downstream applications closely related to human life and health. Despite deep models have made significant advances in capturing the discriminative long-term dependency of surgical videos to achieve improved recognition, they rarely account for exploring and modeling the uncertainty in surgical videos, which should be crucial for reliable online surgical phase recognition. We categorize the sources of uncertainty into two types, frame ambiguity in videos and unbalanced distribution among surgical phases, which are inevitable in surgical videos. To address this pivot issue, we introduce a meta-learning-optimized classification diffusion model (Meta-SurDiff), to take full advantage of the deep generative model and meta-learning in achieving precise frame-level distribution estimation for reliable online surgical phase recognition. For coarse recognition caused by ambiguous video frames, we employ a classification diffusion model to assess the confidence of recognition results at a finer-grained frame-level instance. For coarse recognition caused by unbalanced phase distribution, we use a meta-learning based objective to learn the diffusion model, thus enhancing the robustness of classification boundaries for different surgical phases.We establish effectiveness of Meta-SurDiff in online surgical phase recognition through extensive experiments on five widely used datasets using more than four practical metrics. The datasets include Cholec80, AutoLaparo, M2Cai16, OphNet, and NurViD, where OphNet comes from ophthalmic surgeries, NurViD is the daily care dataset, while the others come from laparoscopic surgeries. We will release the code upon acceptance.