SurgRFO: Foundation Model Based Compositional Synthesis of Critical Retained Foreign Objects in Intraoperative Chest X-rays

Abstract: Critical retained foreign objects (RFOs) on intraoperative chest radiographs are rare but high-risk events. Their scarcity limits robust automated detection model training and generalization. We introduce SurgRFO, a two-stage synthesis framework for generating realistic RFO-present intraoperative chest X-rays. In Stage 1, a Roentgen chest X-ray foundation model is fine-tuned on surgical-domain images to generate realistic RFO-free backgrounds that preserve anatomy, indwelling lines and tubes, and intraoperative imaging characteristics. In Stage 2, a lightweight generator trained on localized RFO patches from limited positive cases synthesizes diverse RFO instances, which are composited onto generated backgrounds using conditional Poisson fusion to improve photometric consistency. We evaluate SurgRFO through (i) a blinded clinician study assessing realism and clinical plausibility, and (ii) downstream detection experiments in which synthesized data are used to augment Faster R-CNN, YOLOv8, and RetinaNet. SurgRFO consistently improves sensitivity at low false-positive-per-image (FPPI) operating points on internal and external test sets. Clinician ratings indicate that the synthesized images achieve realism comparable to real intraoperative images. Ablation analyses further examine fusion strategies and synthesis scale. Ethical safeguards for synthetic surgical data are also discussed.