SurgX: Neuron-Concept Association for Explainable Surgical Phase Recognition

Abstract: Surgical phase recognition plays a crucial role in surgical workflow analysis, enabling various applications such as surgical monitoring, skill assessment, and workflow optimization. Despite significant advancements in deep learning-based surgical phase recognition, these models remain inherently opaque, making it difficult to understand how they make decisions. This lack of interpretability hinders trust and makes it challenging to debug the model. To address this challenge, we propose SurgX, a novel concept-based explanation framework that enhances the interpretability of surgical phase recognition models by associating neurons with relevant concepts. In this paper, we introduce the process of selecting representative example sequences for neurons, constructing a concept set tailored to the surgical video dataset, associating neurons with concepts and identifying neurons crucial for predictions. Through extensive experiments on two surgical phase recognition models, we validate our method and analyze the explanation for prediction. This highlights the potential of our method in explaining surgical phase recognition. The code is available at https://github.com/ailab-kyunghee/SurgX