Appendix300: Surgical video and patient metadata of 330 laparoscopic appendectomy cases from five institutions

Abstract

The limited availability of diverse and representative training data poses a critical barrier to the development of clinically relevant computational tools for intraoperative surgical decision support. Surgical procedures are not routinely recorded, and data annotation requires domain expertise, resulting in a scarcity of open-access surgical video datasets with high-quality annotations. Existing datasets are typically limited to single institutions and specific procedures, such as cholecystectomy, and rarely comprise patient-level metadata like demographic characteristics, disease history, or laboratory parameters. The Appendix300 dataset comprises 330 laparoscopic surgery recordings, including 325 full-length laparoscopic appendectomies and 5 control recordings from non-appendectomy procedures in pediatric and adult patients treated at five German centers. The dataset includes patient-level clinical metadata (demographics, medical history, clinical symptoms, preoperative laboratory parameters, and histopathological findings, as well as standardized expert annotations of the laparoscopic grade of appendicitis. This dataset enables novel validation tasks for computer vision in laparoscopic surgery and facilitates simulation of decentralized learning approaches, overall enhancing the breadth and translational relevance of AI-based surgical video analysis.