Spatio-Temporal Representation Decoupling and Enhancement for Federated Instrument Segmentation in Surgical Videos

Surgical instrument segmentation under Federated Learning (FL) is a promising direction, which enables multiple surgical sites to collaboratively train the model without centralizing datasets. However, there exist very limited FL works in surgical data science, and FL methods for other modalities do not consider inherent characteristics in surgical domain: i) different scenarios show diverse anatomical backgrounds while highly similar instrument representation; ii) there exist surgical simulators which promote large-scale synthetic data generation with minimal efforts. In this paper, we propose a novel Personalized FL scheme, Spatio-Temporal Representation Decoupling and Enhancement (FedST), which wisely leverages surgical domain knowledge during both local-site and global-server training to boost segmentation. Concretely, our model embraces a Representation Separation and Cooperation (RSC) mechanism in local-site training, which decouples the query embedding layer to be trained privately, to encode respective backgrounds. Meanwhile, other parameters are optimized globally to capture the consistent representations of instruments, including the temporal layer to capture similar motion patterns. A textual-guided channel selection is further designed to highlight site-specific features, facilitating model adaptation to each site. Moreover, in global-server training, we propose Synthesis-based Explicit Representation Quantification (SERQ), which defines an explicit representation target based on synthetic data to synchronize the model convergence during fusion for improving model generalization. We construct a new PFL benchmark comprising five surgical sites from public datasets covering four types, with one out-of-federation site. FedST outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on federated sites (1.84% on IoU) and achieves a remarkable improvement on the out-of-federation site (45.29% on IoU). Our code can be made available at: https://github.com/jinlab-imvr/FedST.