SEDMamba: Enhancing Selective State Space Modelling With Bottleneck Mechanism and Fine-to-Coarse Temporal Fusion for Efficient Error Detection in Robot-Assisted Surgery

Automated detection of surgical errors can improve robotic-assisted surgery. Despite promising progress, existing methods still face challenges in capturing rich temporal context to establish long-term dependencies while maintaining computational efficiency. In this letter, we propose a novel hierarchical model named SEDMamba, which incorporates the selective state space model (SSM) into surgical error detection, facilitating efficient long sequence modelling with linear complexity. SEDMamba enhances selective SSM with a bottleneck mechanism and fine-to-coarse temporal fusion (FCTF) to detect and temporally localize surgical errors in long videos. The bottleneck mechanism compresses and restores features within their spatial dimension, thereby reducing computational complexity. FCTF utilizes multiple dilated 1D convolutional layers to merge temporal information across diverse scale ranges, accommodating errors of varying duration. Our work also contributes the first-of-its-kind, frame-level, in-vivo surgical error dataset to support error detection in real surgical cases. Specifically, we deploy the clinically validated observational clinical human reliability assessment tool (OCHRA) to annotate the errors during suturing tasks in an open-source radical prostatectomy dataset (SAR-RARP50). Experimental results demonstrate that our SEDMamba outperforms state-of-the-art methods with at least 1.82% AUC and 3.80% AP performance gains with significantly reduced computational complexity.