WetCat: Enabling Automated Skill Assessment in Wet-Lab Cataract Surgery Videos

To meet the growing demand for systematic surgical training, wet-lab environments have become indispensable platforms for hands-on practice in ophthalmology. Yet, traditional wet-lab training depends heavily on manual performance evaluations, which are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and often subject to variability. Recent advances in computer vision offer promising avenues for automated skill assessment, enhancing both the efficiency and objectivity of surgical education. Despite notable progress in ophthalmic surgical datasets, existing resources predominantly focus on real surgeries or isolated tasks, falling short of supporting comprehensive skill evaluation in controlled wet-lab settings. To address these limitations, we introduce WetCat, the first dataset of wet-lab cataract surgery videos specifically curated for automated skill assessment. WetCat comprises high-resolution recordings of surgeries performed by trainees on artificial eyes, featuring comprehensive phase annotations and semantic segmentations of key anatomical structures. These annotations are meticulously designed to facilitate skill assessment during the critical capsulorhexis and phacoemulsification phases, adhering to standardized surgical skill assessment frameworks. By focusing on these essential phases, WetCat enables the development of interpretable, AI-driven evaluation tools aligned with established clinical metrics. This dataset lays a strong foundation for advancing objective, scalable surgical education and sets a new benchmark for automated workflow analysis and skill assessment in ophthalmology training. The dataset and annotations are publicly available in Synapse.