Robot-assisted surgery is an established clinical practice. The automatic identification of surgical actions is needed for a range of applications, including performance assessment of trainees and surgical process modeling for autonomous execution and monitoring. However, supervised action identification is not feasible, due to the burden of manually annotating recordings of potentially complex and long surgical executions. Moreover, often few example executions of a surgical procedure can be recorded. This paper proposes a novel fast algorithm for unsupervised identification of surgical actions in a standard surgical training task, the ring transfer, executed with da Vinci Research Kit. Exploiting kinematic and semantic visual features automatically extracted from a very limited dataset of executions, we are able to significantly outperform state-of-the-art results on a dataset of non-expert executions (58\% vs. 24\% F1-score), and improve performance in the presence of noise, short actions and non-homogeneous workflows, i.e. non repetitive action sequences.
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Institutes 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）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）
Surgical scene segmentation is fundamentally crucial for prompting cognitive assistance in robotic surgery. However, pixel-wise annotating surgical video in a frame-by-frame manner is expensive and time consuming. To greatly reduce the labeling burden, in this work, we study semi-supervised scene segmentation from robotic surgical video, which is practically essential yet rarely explored before. We consider a clinically suitable annotation situation under the equidistant sampling. We then propose PGV-CL, a novel pseudo-label guided cross-video contrast learning method to boost scene segmentati…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shun Hing Institute of Advanced Engineering, CUHK（香港中文大学晨兴先进工程研究所）；T Stone Robotics Institute, CUHK（香港中文大学T Stone机器人研究所）
Performing low hertz labeling for surgical videos at intervals can greatly releases the burden of surgeons. In this paper, we study the semi-supervised instrument segmentation from robotic surgical videos with sparse annotations. Unlike most previous methods using unlabeled frames individually, we propose a dual motion based method to wisely learn motion flows for segmentation enhancement by leveraging temporal dynamics. We firstly design a flow predictor to derive the motion for jointly propagating the frame-label pairs given the current labeled frame. Considering the fast instrument motion, …
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；German Aerospace Center（德国航空航天中心）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Charing Cross Hospital（查令十字医院）
The aim of this paper is to introduce a robotic platform for autonomous iUS tissue scanning to optimise intraoperative diagnosis and improve surgical resection during robot-assisted operations. To guide anatomy specific robotic scanning and generate a representation of the robot task space, fast and accurate techniques for the recovery of 3D morphological structures of the surgical cavity are developed. The prototypic DLR MIRO surgical robotic arm is used to control the applied force and the in-plane motion of the US transducer. A key application of the proposed platform is the scanning of bra…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Katholieke Universiteit Leuven（天主教鲁汶大学）；University College London Hospitals（伦敦大学学院医院）；Universitair Ziekenhuis Leuven（鲁汶大学医院）；Wellcome / EPSRC Centre for Surgical and Interventional Sciences, UCL, London, UK（惠康/英国工程与物理科学研究委员会外科与介入科学中心（伦敦大学学院））；Surgical Robot Vision Group, CMIC, Dept. Computer Science, University College London（伦敦大学学院计算机科学系CMIC外科机器人视觉小组）；Translational Imaging Group, CMIC, Dept. Med. Phys. Biomed. Eng., University College London（伦敦大学学院医学物理与生物医学工程系CMIC转化成像小组）
Real-time tool segmentation from endoscopic videos is an essential part of many computer-assisted robotic surgical systems and of critical importance in robotic surgical data science. We propose two novel deep learning architectures for automatic segmentation of non-rigid surgical instruments. Both methods take advantage of automated deep-learning-based multi-scale feature extraction while trying to maintain an accurate segmentation quality at all resolutions. The two proposed methods encode the multi-scale constraint inside the network architecture. The first proposed architecture enforces it…
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣迭戈分校）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）
Robotic automation in surgery requires precise tracking of surgical tools and mapping of deformable tissue. Previous works on surgical perception frameworks require significant effort in developing features for surgical tool and tissue tracking. In this work, we overcome the challenge by exploiting deep learning methods for surgical perception. We integrated deep neural networks, capable of efficient feature extraction, into the tissue reconstruction and instrument pose estimation processes. By leveraging transfer learning, the deep learning based approach requires minimal training data and re…
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）
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；T stone Robotics Institute（T石头机器人研究所）；Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Joint Laboratory of Human-Machine Intelligence-Synergy Systems（粤港澳人机协同智能系统联合实验室）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
Surgical instrument segmentation in robot-assisted surgery (RAS) - especially that using learning-based models - relies on the assumption that training and testing videos are sampled from the same domain. However, it is impractical and expensive to collect and annotate sufficient data from every new domain. To greatly increase the label efficiency, we explore a new problem, i.e., adaptive instrument segmentation, which is to effectively adapt one source model to new robotic surgical videos from multiple target domains, only given the annotated instruments in the first frame. We propose MDAL, a…
Surgical-MambaLLM: Mamba2-enhanced Multimodal Large Language Model for VQLA in Robotic Surgery
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科学与技术大学（广州））；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院伦敦分校）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科学与技术大学）
Self-supervised, multi-modal learning has been successful in holistic representation of complex scenarios. This can be useful to consolidate information from multiple modalities which have multiple, versatile uses. Its application in surgical robotics can lead to simultaneously developing a generalised machine understanding of the surgical process and reduce the dependency on quality, expert annotations which are generally difficult to obtain. We develop a self-supervised, multi-modal representation learning paradigm that learns representations for surgical gestures from video and kinematics. …
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 …
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 …
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…
Localising under the drape: proprioception in the era of distributed surgical robotic system
School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, King’s College London（国王学院伦敦生物医学工程与成像科学学院）；Research in Orthopaedic Computer Science, Balgrist University Hospital（骨科计算机科学研究，巴尔格里斯特大学医院）；Faculty of Engineering Technology, KU Leuven（工程科技学院，鲁汶大学）；Noah’s Ark Lab, Huawei（华为诺亚实验室）；University Spine Center Zurich, Balgrist University Hospital, University of Zurich（苏黎世大学脊柱中心，巴尔格里斯特大学医院，苏黎世大学）；SpineGuard, Paris, France（脊柱守护，法国巴黎）；Institut Des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique, Sorbonne University（智能系统与机器人研究所，索邦大学）
State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所复杂系统管理与控制国家重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
The real-time segmentation of surgical instruments plays a crucial role in robot-assisted surgery. However, it is still a challenging task to implement deep learning models to do real-time segmentation for surgical instruments due to their high computational costs and slow inference speed. In this paper, we propose an attention-guided lightweight network (LWANet), which can segment surgical instruments in real-time. LWANet adopts encoder-decoder architecture, where the encoder is the lightweight network MobileNetV2, and the decoder consists of depthwise separable convolution, attention fusion …
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Zhongshan Hospital affiliated to Xiamen University（厦门大学附属中山医院）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Performing a real-time and accurate instrument segmentation from videos is of great significance for improving the performance of robotic-assisted surgery. We identify two important clues for surgical instrument perception, including local temporal dependency from adjacent frames and global semantic correlation in long-range duration. However, most existing works perform segmentation purely using visual cues in a single frame. Optical flow is just used to model the motion between only two frames and brings heavy computational cost. We propose a novel dual-memory network (DMNet) to wisely relat…
Think Step by Step: Chain-of-Gesture Prompting for Error Detection in Robotic Surgical Videos
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences（Wellcome/EPSRC介入与外科科学中心）
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…
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…
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…
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）
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…
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）
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）
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…
SurgicalGS: Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting for Accurate Robotic-Assisted Surgical Scene Reconstruction
The Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院哈姆林 robotic外科中心）；Hawkes Institute, University College London（伦敦大学学院霍克斯研究所）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）
Future Slot Prediction for Unsupervised Object Discovery in Surgical Video
PCASO Laboratory, Department of Surgery, University of Pennsylvania（匹兹堡大学外科实验室、外科系、匹兹堡大学）；Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania（计算机与信息科学系、匹兹堡大学）
We show that it is possible to learn meaningful representations of surgical motion, without supervision, by learning to predict the future. An architecture that combines an RNN encoder-decoder and mixture density networks (MDNs) is developed to model the conditional distribution over future motion given past motion. We show that the learned encodings naturally cluster according to high-level activities, and we demonstrate the usefulness of these learned encodings in the context of information retrieval, where a database of surgical motion is searched for suturing activity using a motion-based …
NELVT, Department of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机科学技术系数字视频编解码技术国家工程实验室）；Deepwise AI Lab（深睿医疗人工智能实验室）；Center on Frontiers of Computing Studies, Peking University（北京大学前沿计算研究中心）；Advanced Institute of Information Technology, Peking University（北京大学信息技术高等研究院）；Peking University Cancer Hospital（北京大学肿瘤医院）
Surgical instrument segmentation is a key component in developing context-aware operating rooms. Existing works on this task heavily rely on the supervision of a large amount of labeled data, which involve laborious and expensive human efforts. In contrast, a more affordable unsupervised approach is developed in this paper. To train our model, we first generate anchors as pseudo labels for instruments and background tissues respectively by fusing coarse handcrafted cues. Then a semantic diffusion loss is proposed to resolve the ambiguity in the generated anchors via the feature correlation bet…
Capital Normal University（首都师范大学）；Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Imaging Technology（北京成像理论与技术高精尖创新中心）
To improve the efficiency of surgical trajectory segmentation for robot learning in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery, this paper presents a fast unsupervised method using video and kinematic data, followed by a promoting procedure to address the over-segmentation issue. Unsupervised deep learning network, stacking convolutional auto-encoder, is employed to extract more discriminative features from videos in an effective way. To further improve the accuracy of segmentation, on one hand, wavelet transform is used to filter out the noises existed in the features from video and kinematic …
Data-driven approaches to assist operating room (OR) workflow analysis depend on large curated datasets that are time consuming and expensive to collect. On the other hand, we see a recent paradigm shift from supervised learning to self-supervised and/or unsupervised learning approaches that can learn representations from unlabeled datasets. In this paper, we leverage the unlabeled data captured in robotic surgery ORs and propose a novel way to fuse the multi-modal data for a single video frame or image. Instead of producing different augmentations (or 'views') of the same image or video frame…
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…
University of Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；IHU Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学医院）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）
Automatic surgical instrument segmentation of endoscopic images is a crucial building block of many computer-assistance applications for minimally invasive surgery. So far, state-of-the-art approaches completely rely on the availability of a ground-truth supervision signal, obtained via manual annotation, thus expensive to collect at large scale. In this paper, we present FUN-SIS, a Fully-UNsupervised approach for binary Surgical Instrument Segmentation. FUN-SIS trains a per-frame segmentation model on completely unlabelled endoscopic videos, by solely relying on implicit motion information an…
Hierarchical Curriculum Learning for Surgical Video Generation: Focusing on Bilateral Axillo-Breast Approach Robotic Thyroidectomy Datasets
Seoul National University College of Medicine（首尔国立大学医学院）；Seoul National University Hospital（首尔国立大学医院）；YONSEI WITH-YOU Surgery Clinic（延世WITH-YOU外科诊所）；Institute of Convergence Medicine with Innovative Technology, Seoul National University Hospital（首尔国立大学医院创新技术融合医学研究所）
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）
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…
Surgical-DeSAM: Decoupling SAM for Instrument Segmentation in Robotic Surgery
Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS)（Wellcome/EPSRC介入与外科科学中心（WEISS））；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Dept. of Computer Science, University College London（伦敦大学学院计算机科学系）
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 …
CoRe-DA: Contrastive Regression for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Surgical Skill Assessment
UCL Hawkes Institute, University College London（伦敦大学学院霍克斯研究所）；Dept of Computer Science, University College London（伦敦大学学院计算机科学系）；The Griffin Institute（格里芬研究所）
University of California San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Research Institute of Frontier Technologies（阿里巴巴-浙江大学前沿技术联合研究院）
Traditional control and task automation have been successfully demonstrated in a variety of structured, controlled environments through the use of highly specialized modeled robotic systems in conjunction with multiple sensors. However, the application of autonomy in endoscopic surgery is very challenging, particularly in soft tissue work, due to the lack of high-quality images and the unpredictable, constantly deforming environment. In this work, we propose a novel surgical perception framework, SuPer, for surgical robotic control. This framework continuously collects 3D geometric information…
Center for Research and Formation in Artificial Intelligence, Universidad de los Andes（安第斯大学人工智能研究与培训中心）
We study the task of semantic segmentation of surgical instruments in robotic-assisted surgery scenes. We propose the Instance-based Surgical Instrument Segmentation Network (ISINet), a method that addresses this task from an instance-based segmentation perspective. Our method includes a temporal consistency module that takes into account the previously overlooked and inherent temporal information of the problem. We validate our approach on the existing benchmark for the task, the Endoscopic Vision 2017 Robotic Instrument Segmentation Dataset, and on the 2018 version of the dataset, whose anno…
