Data-Efficient Surgical Phase Segmentation in Small-Incision Cataract Surgery: A Controlled Study of Vision Foundation Models

arXiv:2604.10514v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Surgical phase segmentation is central to computer-assisted surgery, yet robust models remain difficult to develop when labeled surgical videos are scarce. We study data-efficient phase segmentation for manual small-incision cataract surgery (SICS) through a controlled comparison of visual representations. To isolate representation quality, we pair each visual encoder with the same temporal model (MS-TCN++) under identical training and evaluation