  Surgical robotics holds much promise for improving patient safety and
clinician experience in the Operating Room (OR). However, it also comes with
new challenges, requiring strong team coordination and effective OR management.
Automatic detection of surgical activities is a key requirement for developing
AI-based intelligent tools to tackle these challenges. The current
state-of-the-art surgical activity recognition methods however operate on
image-based representations and depend on large-scale labeled datasets whose
collection is time-consuming and resource-expensive. This work proposes a new
sample-efficient and object-based approach for surgical activity recognition in
the OR. Our method focuses on the geometric arrangements between clinicians and
surgical devices, thus utilizing the significant object interaction dynamics in
the OR. We conduct experiments in a low-data regime study for long video
activity recognition. We also benchmark our method againstother object-centric
approaches on clip-level action classification and show superior performance.
