3D point cloud registration in laparoscopic surgery estimates the transformation between an intraoperative organ reconstructed from video and its preoperative mesh. Because ground-truth transformations are unavailable for real data, supervised networks are trained on synthetic organ pairs.
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.
By Fuxiang Huang, Chenxu Zhang, Liang Han, Lei Zhang
The paper investigates test‑time adaptation (TTA) techniques for 3D point‑cloud registration in laparoscopic surgery, where synthetic training data must be adapted to noisy, sparse, and occluded real intraoperative reconstructions. It adapts three families of TTA methods—model, normalization, and input adaptation—to handle asymmetric shifts between preoperative meshes and intraoperative clouds, replacing classification‑based entropy objectives with correspondence‑based ones. Experiments on synthetic and real targets show that input adaptation consistently reduces registration error with low inference latency, making it the most promising approach for surgical applications.
By Nina Bodelot, Soufiane Belharbi, Eric Granger
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.
By Rulin Zhou, Wanhao Liu, Guoheng Ma, Liangjin Shao, Qiujie Song, Yidu Wang, Guankun Wang, Tong Chen, Long Bai, Luping Zhou, Hongliang Ren
arXiv:2607. 29509v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective multi-organ segmentation in surgical data requires learning the intricate anatomical features and alleviating the challenge of class imbalance, which results from relatively lower proportions of small and limitedly exposed structures.
By Priya Tomar, Aditya Parikh, Christian Bauckhage, Rafet Sifa
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.
By Kirill Skobelev, Eric Fithian, Yegor Baranovski, Jack Cook, Sandeep Angara, Shauna Otto, Zhuang-Fang Yi, John Zhu, Neeraj Mainkar, Margaux Masson-Forsythe, Daniel A. Donoho, X. Y. Han
The paper introduces an unsupervised approach to medical image segmentation by training a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) on 21 unlabeled abdominal CT scans to learn anatomical features. The encoder weights from the DDPM are transferred to a U‑Net for downstream segmentation on the BTCV multi‑organ dataset, resulting in a significant Dice score improvement for liver segmentation from 0.75 to 0.93. In low‑data regimes, diffusion‑pretrained models retain robust performance, achieving high Dice scores even with only 10% of labeled data.
By Akshat G, Divyansh Gupta, Shaleen Bhatnagar, Shilpa Ankalaki, Tusar Kanti Mishra
arXiv:2603.29962v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Surgical procedures are inherently complex and risky, requiring extensive expertise and constant focus to navigate evolving intraoperative scenes....
By Shi Li, Vinkle Srivastav, Nicolas Chanel, Saurav Sharma, Nabani Banik, Lorenzo Arboit, Kun Yuan, Pietro Mascagni, Nicolas Padoy
arXiv:2507.20881v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Endoscopic depth estimation is a critical technology for improving the safety and precision of minimally invasive surgery. It has attracted conside...
By Ke Niu, Zeyun Liu, Xue Feng, Heng Li, Naian Xiao, Binghua Su, Qika Lin, Kaize Shi
Acquiring pixel-level annotations for medical image segmentation is a severe bottleneck. Traditional U-Net architectures, while effective, learn local texture patterns and lack awareness of global ana...
arXiv:2607. 06531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: - Objective: Multimodal deep learning models in oncology are currently limited by monolithic designs that rigidly couple data ingestion, clinical routing, and artificial intelligence (AI) inference.
By Ghassen Marrakchi, Basarab Matei
arXiv:2608. 20154v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Minimally invasive colorectal surgeries (MIS-CRS) are characterised by significant variability and inconsistent outcomes.
By Pietro Mascagni, Julia Alekseenko, Pooja P Jain, Marta Goglia, Andrea Balla, Ludovica Baldari, Gianfranco Silecchia, Claudio Fiorillo, Vincenzo Tondolo, Salvador Morales-Conde, Luigi Boni, Sergio Alfieri, Nicolas Padoy