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
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:2608. 11204v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning reliable surgical manipulation policies is bottlenecked by the scarcity of action-labeled demonstrations: teleoperated surgical robot (e.
By Wenrui Bao, Tianyun Jiang, Zhiben Chen, Ser-Nam Lim, Peter D. Peng, Yuzhang Shang
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...
By Bohan Li, Shuojue Yang, Baorui Peng, Xianda Guo, Erli Zhang, Youqi Tao, Junfeng Duan, Daguang Xu, Qi Dou, Xin Jin, Wenjun Zeng, Hao Zhao, Yueming Jin
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.
By Weiliang Huang, Huanrong Liu, Bob Zhang, Qi Dou, Zhen Chen, Yun Gu, Guy Rosman, Qingbiao Li
The paper presents a method for localizing functional surgical landmarks—specifically instrument tips and anchors—in surgical videos without requiring manual pixel-level mask annotations. It leverages vision foundation models, such as SAM 3, to generate dense structural priors through zero‑shot, point‑prompted masks, and refines landmark predictions with a lightweight, coarse‑to‑fine multi‑frame network. Experiments on 7,867 clips from 60 videos show that the approach achieves F1 scores of 72.4% for tip and 58.0% for anchor localization, with ablations confirming the benefits of structural priors and refinement stages.
By Chenyan Jing, Hao Ding, Lalithkumar Seenivasan, Jacob M. Delgado L\'opez, Mathias Unberath