LapFM: A Laparoscopic Segmentation Foundation Model via Hierarchical Concept Evolving Pre-training

TL;DR

LapFM introduces a hierarchical pre-training approach for laparoscopic image segmentation, leveraging unlabeled data and a concept hierarchy to improve generalization across diverse surgical targets.

Contribution

It proposes a novel Hierarchical Concept Evolving Pre-training paradigm and a large-scale benchmark, LapBench-114K, for universal laparoscopic segmentation.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in laparoscopic segmentation

Establishes new standards for granularity-adaptive generalization

Demonstrates effectiveness of hierarchical concept evolution

Abstract

Surgical segmentation is pivotal for scene understanding yet remains hindered by annotation scarcity and semantic inconsistency across diverse procedures. Existing approaches typically fine-tune natural foundation models (e.g., SAM) with limited supervision, functioning merely as domain adapters rather than surgical foundation models. Consequently, they struggle to generalize across the vast variability of surgical targets. To bridge this gap, we present LapFM, a foundation model designed to evolve robust segmentation capabilities from massive unlabeled surgical images. Distinct from medical foundation models relying on inefficient self-supervised proxy tasks, LapFM leverages a Hierarchical Concept Evolving Pre-training paradigm. First, we establish a Laparoscopic Concept Hierarchy (LCH) via a hierarchical mask decoder with parent-child query embeddings, unifying diverse entities (i.e., Anatomy, Tissue, and Instrument) into a scalable knowledge structure with cross-granularity semantic consistency. Second, we propose a Confidence-driven Evolving Labeling that iteratively generates and filters pseudo-labels based on hierarchical consistency, progressively incorporating reliable samples from unlabeled images into training. This process yields LapBench-114K, a large-scale benchmark comprising 114K image-mask pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LapFM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, establishing new standards for granularity-adaptive generalization in universal laparoscopic segmentation. The source code is available at https://github.com/xq141839/LapFM.