Surgical image segmentation is essential for robot-assisted surgery and intraoperative guidance. However, existing methods are constrained to predefined categories, produce one-shot predictions without adaptive refinement, and lack mechanisms for clinician interaction. We propose IR-SIS, an iterative refinement system for surgical image segmentation that accepts natural language descriptions. IR-SIS leverages a fine-tuned SAM3 for initial segmentation, employs a Vision-Language Model to detect instruments and assess segmentation quality, and applies an agentic workflow that adaptively selects refinement strategies. The system supports clinician-in-the-loop interaction through natural language feedback. We also construct a multi-granularity language-annotated dataset from EndoVis2017 and EndoVis2018 benchmarks. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on both in-domain and out-of-distribution data, with clinician interaction providing additional improvements. Our work establishes the first language-based surgical segmentation framework with adaptive self-refinement capabilities.
@article{arxiv.2602.09252,
title = {VLM-Guided Iterative Refinement for Surgical Image Segmentation with Foundation Models},
author = {Ange Lou and Yamin Li and Qi Chang and Nan Xi and Luyuan Xie and Zichao Li and Tianyu Luan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.09252},
year = {2026}
}