English

Multimodal Transformers for Real-Time Surgical Activity Prediction

Robotics 2024-10-27 v1

Abstract

Real-time recognition and prediction of surgical activities are fundamental to advancing safety and autonomy in robot-assisted surgery. This paper presents a multimodal transformer architecture for real-time recognition and prediction of surgical gestures and trajectories based on short segments of kinematic and video data. We conduct an ablation study to evaluate the impact of fusing different input modalities and their representations on gesture recognition and prediction performance. We perform an end-to-end assessment of the proposed architecture using the JHU-ISI Gesture and Skill Assessment Working Set (JIGSAWS) dataset. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) with 89.5\% accuracy for gesture prediction through effective fusion of kinematic features with spatial and contextual video features. It achieves the real-time performance of 1.1-1.3ms for processing a 1-second input window by relying on a computationally efficient model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.06705,
  title  = {Multimodal Transformers for Real-Time Surgical Activity Prediction},
  author = {Keshara Weerasinghe and Seyed Hamid Reza Roodabeh and Kay Hutchinson and Homa Alemzadeh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.06705},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication

R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:15:44.787Z