Team rankings will be determined by leaderboard position during the final testing phase. This year we are introducing tiered prizes, for either a 2026 award, or an overall award. That is, if your team has the high score across all years, then you are eligible for the overall award. If, however, your team is in the top leaderboard position this year, but failed to beat a previous year's team score, then you will still be eligible for the 2026 award. No teams can be awarded prizes from both categories (i.e. you may win the overall prize, or a 2026 prize, but not both).
This year we will introduce a new statistical analysis for ranking robustness. The analysis will not effect the ultimate ranking. Results of the analysis will be provided to the teams on Challenge Day. All prizes for this challenge are sponsored by Intuitive Surgical. Only teams with a complete submission are considered eligible.
The following prizes are available to all eligible teams:
Category 1: Surgical tool detection¶
1st place 2026 / 1st place overall: $1000 / $3000
2nd place 2026 / 2nd place overall: $500 / $2000
3rd place 2026 / 3rd place overall: $250 / $1000
Best methodology report: $500
Category 2: Surgical Visual Question Answering¶
1st place 2026 / 1st place overall: $1000 / $3000
2nd place 2026 / 2nd place overall: $500 / $2000
3rd place 2026 / 3rd place overall: $250 / $1000
Best methodology report: $500
Please note that as category 1 is a repeat from SurgtoolLoc 2022/23 and SurgVU 2024/25 challenges, only complete team submissions that perform better than the top performing methods from all previous years (2025 leaderboard, 2024 leaderboard, 2023 leaderboard, 2022 leaderboard) will be eligible for the "overall-ranked" cash prizes. This is to encourage improvements of algorithms from previous years. We will re-evaluate all previous top 3 performing methods from each year on the test set this year for comparison. Top placed teams from this year that fail to beat the overall rankings will be eligible for the "2026" awards.
The same conditions hold for category 2 this year on Surgical VQA, where the teams performing better than last year's methods will be eligible for "overall" case prizes, otherwise the "2026" prizes.
The best methodology report prizes will be awarded based on the organizing team's assessment of:
- Explanation and details provided for the method within the report (following the format provided in submission instructions)
- Github repo documentation (the ease in reproducing the algorithm container submitted)
All submissions will be eligible for the best methodology report prize, regardless of how their algorithms performed.
Internal Intuitive teams are not eligible for prizes.
