# Synthetic Dataset Generation and Validation for Robotic Surgery Instrument Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13844 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13844/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a comprehensive workflow for generating and validating a synthetic dataset designed for robotic surgery instrument segmentation. A 3D reconstruction of the Da Vinci robotic arms was refined and animated in Autodesk Maya through a fully automated Python-based pipeline capable of producing photorealistic, labeled video sequences. Each scene integrates randomized motion patterns, lighting variations, and synthetic blood textures to mimic intraoperative variability while preserving pixel-accurate ground truth masks. To validate the realism and effectiveness of the generated data, several segmentation models were trained under controlled ratios of real and synthetic data. Results demonstrate that a balanced composition of real and synthetic samples significantly improves model generalization compared to training on real data only, while excessive reliance on synthetic data introduces a measurable domain shift. The proposed framework provides a reproducible and scalable tool for surgical computer vision, supporting future research in data augmentation, domain adaptation, and simulation-based pretraining for robotic-assisted surgery. Data and code are available at https://github.com/EIDOSLAB/Sintetic-dataset-DaVinci.