CATARACTS 2017: Surgical Tool Detection Challenge

50 cataract surgery videos (>9 hours total) with frame-level annotations of 21 surgical tools. Earlier and larger sibling to Cataract-1K.

At a glance

Field	Value
Short name	cataracts2017
Full name	CATARACTS 2017: Surgical Tool Detection Challenge
First published	2017
Publication date precision	year
Publication date evidence	arxiv.org/abs
Publication date source field	Associated CATARACTS challenge paper: explicit dataset release statement
Publication date reviewed	2026-09-11
Primary category	surgical_video
Resource role	current_dataset
Dataset family	cataracts2017
Contained modalities	surgical_video
Tasks	classification, multilabel
Primary reported quantity	50 videos
Classes	21 (Not reported)
Splits	train, test
Size	50.0 GB
Source-stated terms	CC BY 4.0 (IEEE DataPort)
Normalized terms	cc-by
Descriptive screening label	Standard label without an explicit NC clause; not a permission finding
Terms scope	dataset_files
Access friction	self_service_authenticated
Route backend	Manual (upstream-gated)
Availability	available (checked 2026-07-21)
Acquisition support	guided_instructions_only
Legacy sample-loader status	Metadata and access only

Reported quantities

Role	Count	Unit	Scope	Basis	Evidence
Primary	50	videos	Primary quantity reported in the reviewed catalog source	legacy_catalog_field	ieee-dataport.org/open-access

Counts retain their source-reported units. Additional rows can describe components, paired items, or derivative copies and are not automatically added to the primary quantity.

Notes

IEEE DataPort free account login required.

Documented relationships

These links record source-supported lineage or overlap, not merely similar modality tags.

• cadis is derived from this record: CaDIS adds semantic segmentation labels to frames selected from CATARACTS videos. (evidence)

Access information and download

CLI

# Read-only preflight
eyehub download cataracts2017 --data-dir ./data --dry-run --json

# Download, only when preflight reports supported behavior
eyehub download cataracts2017 --data-dir ./data

Python

from eyedatahub.acquisition import preflight_dataset
from eyedatahub.datasets.registry import REGISTRY

ds = REGISTRY.get_dataset('cataracts2017')
print(preflight_dataset(ds, './data'))  # no download

Upstream page: ieee-dataport.org/open-access

Source-term evidence: ieee-dataport.org/open-access

Loader status

This catalog record provides metadata and access instructions, but it does not yet include a standard DatasetSample loader. Inspect the source file structure or contribute a loader before using it in a training pipeline.

Citation

BibTeX

@misc{cataracts2017,
  title  = { CATARACTS 2017: Surgical Tool Detection Challenge },
  note   = { Al Hajj et al., 'CATARACTS: Challenge on Automatic Tool Annotation for cataRACT Surgery', Medical Image Analysis 2019 },
  year   = { 2019 },
  url    = { https://ieee-dataport.org/open-access/cataracts },
}

Plain text

Al Hajj et al., 'CATARACTS: Challenge on Automatic Tool Annotation for cataRACT Surgery', Medical Image Analysis 2019.

Source-stated terms

• Raw source string: CC BY 4.0 (IEEE DataPort)
• Normalized category: cc-by
• Apparent scope: dataset_files
• Descriptive screening label: Standard label without an explicit NC clause; not a permission finding

⚠️ Source-stated terms, scope, and normalized labels are curation metadata, not legal advice or a permission finding. Review the current official source before transfer or reuse.

Similar resources by shared modality

• ophora: Ophora-160K: Ophthalmic Surgical Video Instruction Dataset (162,185 video clip instruction pairs, unknown)
• lmod_plus: LMOD+ Multimodal Ophthalmology Benchmark (32,633 annotated instances, unknown)
• insegcat: InSegCat: Instance Segmentation for Cataract Surgery (5,581 annotated images, research-only)
• cadis: CaDIS: Cataract Dataset for Image Segmentation (4,670 images, research-only)
• cataract_lmm: Cataract-LMM: Large-Scale Multi-Source Multi-Task Cataract Surgery Benchmark (3,000 videos, cc-by-nc-nd)
• ophnet2024: OphNet2024: Ophthalmic Surgical Video Dataset (2,278 videos, cc-by-nc-sa)
• lmod_cataract_1k: LMOD-Cataract-1K (2,256 images, cc-by)
• lmod_cataract_1k_cot: Cataract-1K Surgical Analysis Chain-of-Thought Dataset (2,256 images, mit)