In robotic surgery, tool tracking is important for providing safe tool-tissue interaction and facilitating surgical skills assessment. Despite recent advances in tool tracking, existing approaches are faced with major difficulties in real-time tracking of articulated tools. Most algorithms are tailored for offline processing with pre-recorded videos. In this paper, we propose a real-time 3D tracking method for articulated tools in robotic surgery. The proposed method is based on the CAD model of the tools as well as robot kinematics to generate online part-based templates for efficient 2D matching and 3D pose estimation. A robust verification approach is incorporated to reject outliers in 2D detections, which is then followed by fusing inliers with robot kinematic readings for 3D pose estimation of the tool. The proposed method has been validated with phantom data, as well as ex vivo and in vivo experiments. The results derived clearly demonstrate the performance advantage of the proposed method when compared to the state-of-the-art.
Autonomy is the frontier of research in robotic surgery and its aim is to improve the quality of surgical procedures in the next future. One fundamental requirement for autonomy is advanced perception capability through vision sensors. In this paper, we propose a novel calibration technique for a surgical scenario with da Vinci robot. Calibration of the camera and the robot is necessary for precise positioning of the tools in order to emulate the high performance surgeons. Our calibration technique is tailored for RGB-D camera. Different tests performed on relevant use cases for surgery prove …
Suture needle localization is necessary for autonomous suturing. Previous approaches in autonomous suturing often relied on fiducial markers rather than markerless detection schemes for localizing a suture needle due to the inconsistency of markerless detections. However, fiducial markers are not practical for real-world applications and can often be occluded from environmental factors in surgery (e.g., blood). Therefore in this work, we present a robust tracking approach for estimating the 6D pose of a suture needle when using inconsistent detections. We define observation models based on sut…
The use of robots in minimally invasive surgery has improved the quality of standard surgical procedures. So far, only the automation of simple surgical actions has been investigated by researchers, while the execution of structured tasks requiring reasoning on the environment and the choice among multiple actions is still managed by human surgeons. In this paper, we propose a framework to implement surgical task automation. The framework consists of a task-level reasoning module based on answer set programming, a low-level motion planning module based on dynamic movement primitives, and a sit…
Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS)（惠康/工程与物理科学研究委员会介入与外科科学中心（WEISS））；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Objective: Surgical activity recognition is a fundamental step in computer-assisted interventions. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in methods for automatic recognition of fine-grained gestures in robotic surgery focusing on recent data-driven approaches and outlines the open questions and future research directions. Methods: An article search was performed on 5 bibliographic databases with the following search terms: robotic, robot-assisted, JIGSAWS, surgery, surgical, gesture, fine-grained, surgeme, action, trajectory, segmentation, recognition, parsing. Selected articles were classif…
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Intuitive Surgical Inc.（直观医疗公司）
Detection, tracking, and pose estimation of surgical instruments are crucial tasks for computer assistance during minimally invasive robotic surgery. In the majority of cases, the first step is the automatic segmentation of surgical tools. Prior work has focused on binary segmentation, where the objective is to label every pixel in an image as tool or background. We improve upon previous work in two major ways. First, we leverage recent techniques such as deep residual learning and dilated convolutions to advance binary-segmentation performance. Second, we extend the approach to multi-class se…
Autonomous suturing has been a long-sought-after goal for surgical robotics. Outside of staged environments, accurate localization of suture needles is a critical foundation for automating various suture needle manipulation tasks in the real world. When localizing a needle held by a gripper, previous work usually tracks them separately without considering their relationship. Because of the significant errors that can arise in the stereo-triangulation of objects and instruments, their reconstructions may often not be consistent. This can lead to unrealistic tool-needle grasp reconstructions tha…
Scene Graph-Driven Haptic Feedback for Safety Enhancement in Robotic Ophthalmic Surgery via Physically Simulated iOCT
Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学慕尼黑机器人与机器智能研究所）；TUM School of Engineering and Design, Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学工程与设计学院）
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Morehouse College（莫尔豪斯学院）
Articulated objects pose a unique challenge for robotic perception and manipulation. Their increased number of degrees-of-freedom makes tasks such as localization computationally difficult, while also making the process of real-world dataset collection unscalable. With the aim of addressing these scalability issues, we propose Neural Articulated Radiance Fields (NARF22), a pipeline which uses a fully-differentiable, configuration-parameterized Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) as a means of providing high quality renderings of articulated objects. NARF22 requires no explicit knowledge of the object…
Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS), University College London（伦敦大学学院威康/EPSRC介入与外科科学中心）；Department of Computer Science, University College London（伦敦大学学院计算机科学系）
Semantic tool segmentation in surgical videos is important for surgical scene understanding and computer-assisted interventions as well as for the development of robotic automation. The problem is challenging because different illumination conditions, bleeding, smoke and occlusions can reduce algorithm robustness. At present labelled data for training deep learning models is still lacking for semantic surgical instrument segmentation and in this paper we show that it may be possible to use robot kinematic data coupled with laparoscopic images to alleviate the labelling problem. We propose a ne…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）；Singapore General Hospital（新加坡中央医院）
Learning to infer graph representations and performing spatial reasoning in a complex surgical environment can play a vital role in surgical scene understanding in robotic surgery. For this purpose, we develop an approach to generate the scene graph and predict surgical interactions between instruments and surgical region of interest (ROI) during robot-assisted surgery. We design an attention link function and integrate with a graph parsing network to recognize the surgical interactions. To embed each node with corresponding neighbouring node features, we further incorporate SageConv into the …
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Automatic surgical gesture recognition is fundamentally important to enable intelligent cognitive assistance in robotic surgery. With recent advancement in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery, rich information including surgical videos and robotic kinematics can be recorded, which provide complementary knowledge for understanding surgical gestures. However, existing methods either solely adopt uni-modal data or directly concatenate multi-modal representations, which can not sufficiently exploit the informative correlations inherent in visual and kinematics data to boost gesture recogniti…
NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering (NGS), National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学综合科学与工程研究生院）；Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学生物医学工程系）；Dept. of Instrumentation and Control Engineering, NIT Trichy（印度国立理工学院蒂鲁奇拉帕利分校仪器与控制工程系）；Dept. of Otolaryngology, Singapore General Hospital（新加坡中央医院耳鼻喉科）
Representation learning of the task-oriented attention while tracking instrument holds vast potential in image-guided robotic surgery. Incorporating cognitive ability to automate the camera control enables the surgeon to concentrate more on dealing with surgical instruments. The objective is to reduce the operation time and facilitate the surgery for both surgeons and patients. We propose an end-to-end trainable Spatio-Temporal Multi-Task Learning (ST-MTL) model with a shared encoder and spatio-temporal decoders for the real-time surgical instrument segmentation and task-oriented saliency dete…
Robotic-assisted surgeries benefit both surgeons and patients, however, surgeons frequently need to adjust the endoscopic camera to achieve good viewpoints. Simultaneously controlling the camera and the surgical instruments is impossible, and consequentially, these camera adjustments repeatedly interrupt the surgery. Autonomous camera control could help overcome this challenge, but most existing systems are reactive, e.g., by having the camera follow the surgical instruments. We propose a predictive approach for anticipating when camera movements will occur using artificial neural networks. We…
California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Surgery is a high-stakes domain where surgeons must navigate critical anatomical structures and actively avoid potential complications while achieving the main task at hand. Such surgical activity has been shown to affect long-term patient outcomes. To better understand this relationship, whose mechanics remain unknown for the majority of surgical procedures, we hypothesize that the core elements of surgery must first be quantified in a reliable, objective, and scalable manner. We believe this is a prerequisite for the provision of surgical feedback and modulation of surgeon performance in pur…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Surgical instrument segmentation -- in general a pixel classification task -- is fundamentally crucial for promoting cognitive intelligence in robot-assisted surgery (RAS). However, previous methods are struggling with discriminating instrument types and instances. To address the above issues, we explore a mask classification paradigm that produces per-segment predictions. We propose TraSeTR, a novel Track-to-Segment Transformer that wisely exploits tracking cues to assist surgical instrument segmentation. TraSeTR jointly reasons about the instrument type, location, and identity with instance-…
Can DeepSeek Reason Like a Surgeon? An Empirical Evaluation for Vision-Language Understanding in Robotic-Assisted Surgery
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；INSERM（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；ICube（ICube实验室）；IHU Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学医院研究所）
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Segmentation of surgical instruments is an important problem in robot-assisted surgery: it is a crucial step towards full instrument pose estimation and is directly used for masking of augmented reality overlays during surgical procedures. Most applications rely on accurate real-time segmentation of high-resolution surgical images. While previous research focused primarily on methods that deliver high accuracy segmentation masks, majority of them can not be used for real-time applications due to their computational cost. In this work, we design a light-weight and highly-efficient deep residual…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Recent works in robotic manipulation through reinforcement learning (RL) or imitation learning (IL) have shown potential for tackling a range of tasks e.g., opening a drawer or a cupboard. However, these techniques generalize poorly to unseen objects. We conjecture that this is due to the high-dimensional action space for joint control. In this paper, we take an alternative approach and separate the task of learning 'what to do' from 'how to do it' i.e., whole-body control. We pose the RL problem as one of determining the skill dynamics for a disembodied virtual manipulator interacting with ar…
SceneFoundry: Generating Interactive Infinite 3D Worlds
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（国家阳明交通大学）；National Tsing Hua University（国立清华大学）；NVIDIA AI Technology Center（NVIDIA AI技术中心）；National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学）
Dynamic Interactive Relation Capturing via Scene Graph Learning for Robotic Surgical Report Generation
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
SurgeoNet: Realtime 3D Pose Estimation of Articulated Surgical Instruments from Stereo Images using a Synthetically-trained Network
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））；University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU)（凯泽斯劳滕-兰道大学（RPTU））；NUST-SEECS（国家科技大学工程与应用科学学院（NUST-SEECS））；University of Prince Mugrin (UPM)（穆格林王子大学（UPM））
The Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, IGHI, Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院哈姆林机器人手术中心）；Dyson Robotics Laboratory, Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院戴森机器人实验室）；OpenAI；Department of Surgery and Cancer, Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院外科与癌症系）
Robotic surgery has become a powerful tool for performing minimally invasive procedures, providing advantages in dexterity, precision, and 3D vision, over traditional surgery. One popular robotic system is the da Vinci surgical platform, which allows preoperative information to be incorporated into live procedures using Augmented Reality (AR). Scene depth estimation is a prerequisite for AR, as accurate registration requires 3D correspondences between preoperative and intraoperative organ models. In the past decade, there has been much progress on depth estimation for surgical scenes, such as …
Reconstruction of the soft tissues in robotic surgery from endoscopic stereo videos is important for many applications such as intra-operative navigation and image-guided robotic surgery automation. Previous works on this task mainly rely on SLAM-based approaches, which struggle to handle complex surgical scenes. Inspired by recent progress in neural rendering, we present a novel framework for deformable tissue reconstruction from binocular captures in robotic surgery under the single-viewpoint setting. Our framework adopts dynamic neural radiance fields to represent deformable surgical scenes…
Image-to-Force Estimation for Soft Tissue Interaction in Robotic-Assisted Surgery Using Structured Light
School of Electronic Information Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学电子与信息工程学院）；MicroPort MedBot (Group) Company Ltd.（微创医疗机器人（集团）股份有限公司）；College of Engineering, Peking University（北京大学工学院）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering (NGS)（新加坡国立大学综合科学与工程研究生院（NGS））；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Moratuwa（莫拉图瓦大学）；NIT Trichy（印度国立理工学院蒂鲁吉拉伯利分校）
Robot-assisted surgery is an emerging technology which has undergone rapid growth with the development of robotics and imaging systems. Innovations in vision, haptics and accurate movements of robot arms have enabled surgeons to perform precise minimally invasive surgeries. Real-time semantic segmentation of the robotic instruments and tissues is a crucial step in robot-assisted surgery. Accurate and efficient segmentation of the surgical scene not only aids in the identification and tracking of instruments but also provided contextual information about the different tissues and instruments be…
We propose an unsupervised vision-based system to estimate the joint configurations of the robot arm from a sequence of RGB or RGB-D images without knowing the model a priori, and then adapt it to the task of category-independent articulated object pose estimation. We combine a classical geometric formulation with deep learning and extend the use of epipolar constraint to multi-rigid-body systems to solve this task. Given a video sequence, the optical flow is estimated to get the pixel-wise dense correspondences. After that, the 6D pose is computed by a modified PnP algorithm. The key idea is …
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；Carl Zeiss Meditec（卡尔蔡司医疗技术公司）；Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）；Klinikum rechts der Isar der Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学 Rechts der Isar 医院）
Ophthalmic microsurgery is known to be a challenging operation, which requires very precise and dexterous manipulation. Image guided robot-assisted surgery (RAS) is a promising solution that brings significant improvements in outcomes and reduces the physical limitations of human surgeons. However, this technology must be further developed before it can be routinely used in clinics. One of the problems is the lack of proper calibration between the robotic manipulator and appropriate imaging device. In this work, we developed a flexible framework for hand-eye calibration of an ophthalmic robot …
UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）；UC Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Building home assistant robots has long been a pursuit for vision and robotics researchers. To achieve this task, a simulated environment with physically realistic simulation, sufficient articulated objects, and transferability to the real robot is indispensable. Existing environments achieve these requirements for robotics simulation with different levels of simplification and focus. We take one step further in constructing an environment that supports household tasks for training robot learning algorithm. Our work, SAPIEN, is a realistic and physics-rich simulated environment that hosts a la…
Purpose Surgical simulations play an increasingly important role in surgeon education and developing algorithms that enable robots to perform surgical subtasks. To model anatomy, Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations have been held as the gold standard for calculating accurate soft-tissue deformation. Unfortunately, their accuracy is highly dependent on the simulation parameters, which can be difficult to obtain. Methods In this work, we investigate how live data acquired during any robotic endoscopic surgical procedure may be used to correct for inaccurate FEM simulation results. Since FEMs…
Asan Medical Center（峨山医疗中心）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Chungnam National University School of Medicine（忠南大学医学院）
Some endoscopic surgeries require a surgeon to hold the endoscope with one hand and the surgical instruments with the other hand to perform the actual surgery with correct vision. Recent technical advances in deep learning as well as in robotics can introduce robotics to these endoscopic surgeries. This can have numerous advantages by freeing one hand of the surgeon, which will allow the surgeon to use both hands and to use more intricate and sophisticated techniques. Recently, deep learning with convolutional neural network achieves state-of-the-art results in computer vision. Therefore, the …
MIT（麻省理工学院）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Olympus Corporation（奥林巴斯公司）
Comprehension of surgical workflow is the foundation upon which artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) holds the potential to assist intraoperative decision-making and risk mitigation. In this work, we move beyond mere identification of past surgical phases, into the prediction of future surgical steps and specification of the transitions between them. We use a novel Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) formulation to sample future surgical phases trajectories conditioned on past video frames from laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) videos and compare it to state-of-the-art appro…
Human life is populated with articulated objects. A comprehensive understanding of articulated objects, namely appearance, structure, physics property, and semantics, will benefit many research communities. As current articulated object understanding solutions are usually based on synthetic object dataset with CAD models without physics properties, which prevent satisfied generalization from simulation to real-world applications in visual and robotics tasks. To bridge the gap, we present AKB-48: a large-scale Articulated object Knowledge Base which consists of 2,037 real-world 3D articulated o…
DARES: Depth Anything in Robotic Endoscopic Surgery with Self-supervised Vector-LoRA of the Foundation Model
Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS)（惠康/英国工程与物理科学研究委员会介入与外科科学中心（WEISS））；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）；Centre for Medical Image Computing（医学影像计算中心）
SAM Meets Robotic Surgery: An Empirical Study in Robustness Perspective
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Hubei University of Technology（湖北工业大学）
hutom；Yonsei University College of Medicine（延世大学医学院）
Automated surgical instrument localization is an important technology to understand the surgical process and in order to analyze them to provide meaningful guidance during surgery or surgical index after surgery to the surgeon. We introduce a new dataset that reflects the kinematic characteristics of surgical instruments for automated surgical instrument localization of surgical videos. The hSDB(hutom Surgery DataBase)-instrument dataset consists of instrument localization information from 24 cases of laparoscopic cholecystecomy and 24 cases of robotic gastrectomy. Localization information for…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Twentieth Century Fox（二十世纪福克斯公司）；Starfleet Academy（星际舰队学院）；Tyrell Inc.（泰瑞尔公司）
Video understanding of robot-assisted surgery (RAS) videos is an active research area. Modeling the gestures and skill level of surgeons presents an interesting problem. The insights drawn may be applied in effective skill acquisition, objective skill assessment, real-time feedback, and human-robot collaborative surgeries. We propose a solution to the tool detection and localization open problem in RAS video understanding, using a strictly computer vision approach and the recent advances of deep learning. We propose an architecture using multimodal convolutional neural networks for fast detect…
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；NYU Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）
Object Tokens as a Bridge Between Segmentation and Visual Question Answering in Robotic Surgery
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学生物医学工程系）；Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学电气工程系）；Department of Surgery, University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心外科）
