Point Tracking in Surgery--The 2025 Surgical Tattoos in Infrared Challenge (STIRC2025)

Adam Schmidt, Mert Asim Karaoglu, Zijian Wu, Jiaming Zhang, Yuxin Chen, Tim Salcudean, Ho-Gun Ha, Minkang Jang, Kyungmin Jung, Ihsan Ullah, Hyunki Lee, Suresh Guttikonda, Sarah Latus, Alexander Schlaefer, Xinkai Zhao, Yuichiro Hayashi, Masahiro Oda, Takayuki Kitasaka, Kensaku Mori, Peng Liu, Chenyang Li, Stefanie Speidel, Aoife Gardiner, Agostino Stilli, Danail Stoyanov, Francisco Vasconcelos, Anwesa Choudhuri, Meng Zheng, Zhongpai Gao, Benjamin Planche, Van Nguyen Nguyen, Terrence Chen, Ziyan Wu, Alexander Ladikos, Omid Mohareri

Point tracking in surgery is crucial to enable applications in downstream tasks such as segmentation, 3D reconstruction, virtual tissue landmarking, autonomous probe-based scanning, and subtask autonomy. This paper introduces the 2025 iteration of a point tracking challenge to address this, wherein participants submit their algorithms for quantification. Their algorithms are evaluated using a dataset named surgical tattoos in infrared (STIR), with the challenge named the STIR Challenge 2025 (STIRC2025). The STIR Challenge 2025 comprises two quantitative components: accuracy and efficiency. The accuracy component tests the accuracy of algorithms on in vivo and ex vivo sequences. The efficiency component tests algorithm inference latency. The challenge was conducted as a part of MICCAI EndoVis 2025, and seven teams participated in this challenge. In this paper we summarize the challenge results and participant methods. The challenge dataset is available at: https://zenodo.org/records/20191078, and the code for baseline models and metrics calculation is available here: https://github.com/athaddius/STIRMetrics