From Presence Labels to Bounding Boxes: Can Multimodal Large Language Models Scale Surgical Instrument Localization?

Mohamed Hamdy; Muraam Abdel-Ghani; Fatmaelzahraa Ahmed; Sifna Nasar; Mariam Ahmed; Khalid Al-Jalham; Abdulaziz Al-Ali; Shidin Balakrishnan

arXiv · 2610.34218

From Presence Labels to Bounding Boxes: Can Multimodal Large Language Models Scale Surgical Instrument Localization?

Mohamed Hamdy·Muraam Abdel-Ghani·Fatmaelzahraa Ahmed·Sifna Nasar·Mariam Ahmed·Khalid Al-Jalham·Abdulaziz Al-Ali·Shidin Balakrishnan

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Abstract

Spatial localization of surgical instruments through bounding-box annotations is a foundational component of surgical scene understanding, supporting detection, tracking, interaction analysis, and grounded vision-language applications. Yet existing annotations often cover selected frames, video subsets, or dataset variants rather than complete procedures. Manual extension is time-consuming and expert-dependent. Additionally, weakly supervised and detector-based pseudo-labels require task-specific training and may be imprecise. In this study, we design a scalable MLLM-based annotation framework that converts surgical frames and existing instrument-presence labels into accurate bounding boxes, and systematically analyze its reliability, cost, and design sensitivity. We instantiate the framework using six MLLMs and a multi-call configuration on laparoscopic cholecystectomy in Cholec80. Using a carefully designed stratification scheme, two annotators independently label 1,000 frames, and an expert surgeon reviews one annotation set to establish the reference. Results show that instrument-set F1 ranges from 88.2 to 92.7,whereas mIoU ranges from 0.180 to 0.735, showing that comparable recognition can conceal large localization differences. A structured multi-stage annotation pipeline achieves 0.784 mIoU, compared with 0.735 for the best single-call baseline and 0.814 human-human agreement. Using the best accuracy pipeline, we create and publicly release a spatial extension of Cholec80 comprising 285,977 bounding boxes across all 184,498 annotated frames from the 80 videos. The annotations and human references are made available on GitHub

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Mohamed Hamdy, Muraam Abdel-Ghani, Fatmaelzahraa Ahmed, Sifna Nasar, Mariam Ahmed, Khalid Al-Jalham, Abdulaziz Al-Ali, Shidin Balakrishnan. 2026-10-25. From Presence Labels to Bounding Boxes: Can Multimodal Large Language Models Scale Surgical Instrument Localization?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34218

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