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 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 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