CLIP-RL: Surgical Scene Segmentation Using Contrastive Language-Vision Pretraining & Reinforcement Learning

Understanding surgical scenes can provide better healthcare quality for patients, especially with the vast amount of video data that is generated during MIS. Processing these videos generates valuable assets for training sophisticated models. In this paper, we introduce CLIP-RL, a novel contrastive language-image pre-training model tailored for semantic segmentation for surgical scenes. CLIP-RL presents a new segmentation approach which involves reinforcement learning and curriculum learning, enabling continuous refinement of the segmentation masks during the full training pipeline. Our model has shown robust performance in different optical settings, such as occlusions, texture variations, and dynamic lighting, presenting significant challenges. CLIP model serves as a powerful feature extractor, capturing rich semantic context that enhances the distinction between instruments and tissues. The RL module plays a pivotal role in dynamically refining predictions through iterative action-space adjustments. We evaluated CLIP-RL on the EndoVis 2018 and EndoVis 2017 datasets. CLIP-RL achieved a mean IoU of 81%, outperforming state-of-the-art models, and a mean IoU of 74.12% on EndoVis 2017. This superior performance was achieved due to the combination of contrastive learning with reinforcement learning and curriculum learning.

Fatmaelzahraa Ali Ahmed, Muhammad Arsalan, Abdulaziz Al-Ali, Khalid Al-Jalham, Shidin Balakrishnan · 2025