Abstract
Vision foundation models are the backbone of modern surgical image analysis, yet most surgical systems still rely on encoders pretrained on natural images or on specialist models trained from scratch on comparatively small datasets. Pretraining encoders on large amounts of surgery-specific data has the potential to generally enhance the performance of surgical image analysis methods simply by providing stronger backbones. Here we present InnerLogic-Surg, an open family of surgical vision encoders (21M--300M parameters) obtained by continually pretraining a transformer-based image encoder on millions of surgical images curated from 11,965 internet-sourced surgical videos spanning ~2,900 hours and more than fifteen procedure types. Our training recipe inherits DINOv3's pretraining stage to preserve representation ability after surgical adaptation, and additionally applies a learned feature-upsampling module for high-resolution dense prediction at low token cost. Across a benchmark covering workflow, instrument and anatomy recognition, segmentation, detection, and monocular depth, under the same architecture, the largest InnerLogic-Surg model achieves the best linear-probe performance in all 20 surgical tasks. We demonstrate that surgical continual pretraining yields transferable representations that generalize across procedures, anatomical regions, and task types, showing our surgical image encoders as a promising and scalable alternative to the procedure-specific representation learning approaches that have traditionally dominated surgical computer vision.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07883
