This survey reviews recent advances in surgical video generation, categorizing methods into unconditional, conditional, and world modeling generation. It highlights a shift from creating visually plausible frames to modeling the causal dynamics of surgical scenes, and discusses challenges such as pixel-level fidelity versus clinical plausibility, generalization, physical realism, controllability, and interpretability. The paper also compiles experimental results from public datasets to serve as a quantitative benchmark for the field.
arXiv:2608. 06770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Controllable surgical world models can provide a generative foundation for surgical artificial intelligence and simulation by synthesizing realistic instrument--tissue interactions.
arXiv:2605.08712v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Action-conditioned surgical video generation is a critical yet highly challenging problem for robotic surgery. The core difficulty is that low-dime...
arXiv:2608. 11204v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning reliable surgical manipulation policies is bottlenecked by the scarcity of action-labeled demonstrations: teleoperated surgical robot (e.
arXiv:2603. 27341v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) models have matched or exceeded human experts in several benchmarks of biomedical task performance, but surgical benchmarks in particular are often missing from prominent medical benchmark suites.
arXiv:2608. 20284v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable surgical planning requires models to anticipate not only how instruments will move, but also how the operative visual state will evolve together with such motion.
arXiv:2604. 21017v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous medical robots hold promise to improve patient outcomes, reduce provider workload, democratize access to care, and enable superhuman precision.
arXiv:2603. 26720v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting surgical needle trajectories from endoscopic video is critical for robot-assisted suturing, enabling anticipatory planning, real-time guidance, and safer motion execution.
Effective multi-task learning for surgical scene understanding is fundamentally hindered by annotation granularity mismatch; temporal workflow tasks such as phase recognition, step recognition and anticipation benefit from dense frame-level supervision, whereas pixel-level spatial tasks including instrument segmentation and action recognition are only sparsely annotated on selected keyframes due to prohibitive labeling costs. This supervision imbalance undermines shared representation learning and limits joint optimization across heterogeneous surgical tasks.
arXiv:2607. 13237v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Precise spatial-temporal annotation of laparoscopic videos is time-consuming and requires expert knowledge.
We introduce SurgAtlas, the largest surgical video-language dataset to date, comprising 15,291 videos (2,391 hours) spanning 18 surgical specialties and over 5,000 procedure types, sourced entirely from publicly available YouTube content. SurgAtlas is also the first surgical video-language dataset to include open surgery at scale, with 6,182 open procedure videos alongside over 9,000 minimally invasive recordings, and the first to establish standardized benchmarks for open-surgery video understanding.
arXiv:2606. 29247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models represent a promising direction for embodied intelligence in surgical robotics.
arXiv:2606. 00267v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video world models (WMs) have shown promise for policy evaluation and improvement by imagining realistic future observations conditioned on ego-robot actions.