arXiv Computer Vision

SurgiATM: A Physics-Guided Plug-and-Play Model for Deep Learning-Based Smoke Removal in Laparoscopic Surgery

The paper introduces SurgiATM, a lightweight physics-guided module for removing surgical smoke from laparoscopic endoscopic frames. It integrates a physics-based atmospheric model with a data-driven deep learning approach via a Mixture-of-Experts output stage, using a Laplacian-like error distribution to model smoke. SurgiATM adds only two hyperparameters and no extra trainable weights, enabling easy integration into existing desmoking architectures and improving accuracy and stability across multiple datasets and procedures.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

SurgMotion: A Video-Native Foundation Model for Universal Understanding of Surgical Videos

SurgMotion is a video-native foundation model that replaces pixel-level reconstruction with latent motion prediction for surgical video analysis. It introduces motion-guided masked prediction, spatiotemporal affinity self-distillation, and spatiotemporal feature diversity regularization to focus on semantically meaningful regions and avoid representation collapse. Trained on SurgMotion-15M, the largest surgical video dataset, it outperforms state-of-the-art methods across 17 benchmarks, improving workflow recognition, action triplet recognition, skill assessment, polyp segmentation, and depth estimation.

By Jinlin Wu, Felix Holm, Chuxi Chen, An Wang, Yaxin Hu, Xiaofan Ye, Zelin Zang, Miao Xu, Lihua Zhou, Huai Liao, Danny T. M. Chan, Ming Feng, Wai S. Poon, Hongliang Ren, Dong Yi, Nassir Navab, Gaofeng Meng, Jiebo Luo, Hongbin Liu, Zhen Lei
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Surgical Video Generation From Diffusion to World Models: A Survey

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Test Time Adaptation Methods for Point Cloud Registration in Laparoscopic Surgery

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 AI
Aug 10

Surg-UniWorld: A Unified Surgical World Model with Multimodal Control Experts

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 Computer Vision
Oct 26

LapaFM: A Laparoscopic Foundation Model via Multi-Stage Continual Learning

arXiv:2610.32263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence-based analysis of intraoperative laparoscopic videos has the potential to improve surgical decision-making and precision. Howev...

By Xiaobo Zhu, Shiwei Wu, Yu An, Yuechen Tao, He Sun, Song Zhang, Jianbo Wang, Xiaojing Wang, Junwei Liu, Wei Guo, Yanfei Shao, Xuan Zhao, Jiangwei Xiao, Wenbo Niu, Bo Wei, Yuhan Wang, Gang Hu, Fei Liu, Kunshan He, Chongwei Chi, Jianqiang Tang, Kang Zhang, Jie Tian, Zhenyu Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 3

Leveraging Transfer Learning with Class-Specific Decoders for Laparoscopic Segmentation

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 Computer Vision
Sep 4

SurgAtlas: A Large-Scale Surgical Video-Language Dataset with 2,391 Hours of Open and Minimally Invasive Surgery

SurgAtlas is the largest surgical video‑language dataset, containing 15,291 videos (2,391 hours) across 18 specialties and over 5,000 procedure types, all sourced from public YouTube. It uniquely includes open‑surgery videos at scale (6,182) alongside more than 9,000 minimally invasive recordings, and introduces standardized benchmarks for open‑surgery video understanding. The dataset offers a rich, multi‑tier annotation schema—segment‑level captions, step/phase descriptions, video‑level surgical narratives, and reasoning‑oriented VQA pairs—validated by experts and built through an automated LLM‑enriched pipeline. "whyItMatters":"SurgAtlas provides an unprecedentedly large, diverse, and clinically validated resource that can train and benchmark multimodal surgical AI models, advancing the development of next‑generation foundation models for surgery."

By Filippos Bellos, Andre S. Gala-Garza, Miaowei Wang, Alyssa M. Hardin, Ahmad M. Hider, Li Yayuan, Jing Bi, Susan Liang, Chenliang Xu, Donald S. Likosky, Jason J. Corso
arXiv AI
Aug 11

A Comparative Study in Surgical AI: Potential and Limitations of Data, Compute, and Scaling

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

State-Change Learning for Prediction of Future Events in Endoscopic Videos

The paper introduces SurgFUTR, a state‑change learning framework for predicting future events in endoscopic videos. Instead of forecasting raw observations, it classifies transitions between current and future states using a teacher‑student architecture and an Action Dynamics module. The authors also present SFPBench, a benchmark with five short‑ and long‑term prediction tasks, and demonstrate consistent improvements across multiple datasets and procedures, including cross‑procedure transfer.

By Saurav Sharma, Chinedu Innocent Nwoye, Didier Mutter, Nicolas Padoy