Event-Level Detection of Surgical Instrument Handovers in Videos with Interpretable Vision Models

ArXi:2604.07577v1 Announce Type: new Reliable monitoring of surgical instrument exchanges is essential for maintaining procedural efficiency and patient safety in the operating room. Automatic detection of instrument handovers in intraoperative video remains challenging due to frequent occlusions, background clutter, and the temporally evolving nature of interaction events. We propose a spatiotemporal vision framework for event-level detection and direction classification of surgical instrument handovers in surgical videos.