Data scarcity remains a fundamental barrier to achieving fully autonomous surgical robots. While large scale vision language action (VLA) models have shown impressive generalization in household and industrial manipulation by leveraging paired video action data from diverse domains, surgical robotics suffers from the paucity of datasets that include both visual observations and accurate robot kinematics. In contrast, vast corpora of surgical videos exist, but they lack corresponding action labels, preventing direct application of imitation learning or VLA training. In this work, we aim to alleviate this problem by learning policy models from Cosmos-H-Surgical, a world model designed for surgical physical AI. We curated the Surgical Action Text Alignment (SATA) dataset with detailed action description specifically for surgical robots. Then we built Cosmos-H-Surgical based on the most advanced physical AI world model and SATA. It's able to generate diverse, generalizable and realistic surgery videos. We are also the first to use an inverse dynamics model to infer pseudokinematics from synthetic surgical videos, producing synthetic paired video action data. We demonstrate that a surgi
The accurate reconstruction of surgical scenes from surgical videos is critical for various applications, including intraoperative navigation and image-guided robotic surgery automation. However, previous approaches, mainly relying on depth estimation, have limited effectiveness in reconstructing surgical scenes with moving surgical tools. To address this limitation and provide accurate 3D position prediction for surgical tools in all frames, we propose a novel approach called SAMSNeRF that combines Segment Anything Model (SAM) and Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) techniques. Our approach generates accurate segmentation masks of surgical tools using SAM, which guides the refinement of the dynamic surgical scene reconstruction by NeRF. Our experimental results on public endoscopy surgical videos demonstrate that our approach successfully reconstructs high-fidelity dynamic surgical scenes and accurately reflects the spatial information of surgical tools. Our proposed approach can significantly enhance surgical navigation and automation by providing surgeons with accurate 3D position information of surgical tools during surgery.The source code will be released soon.
Physics-based simulations have accelerated progress in robot learning for driving, manipulation, and locomotion. Yet, a fast, accurate, and robust surgical simulation environment remains a challenge. In this paper, we present ORBIT-Surgical, a physics-based surgical robot simulation framework with photorealistic rendering in NVIDIA Omniverse. We provide 14 benchmark surgical tasks for the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) and Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) which represent common subtasks in surgical training. ORBIT-Surgical leverages GPU parallelization to train reinforcement learning and imitation learning algorithms to facilitate study of robot learning to augment human surgical skills. ORBIT-Surgical also facilitates realistic synthetic data generation for active perception tasks. We demonstrate ORBIT-Surgical sim-to-real transfer of learned policies onto a physical dVRK robot. Project website: orbit-surgical.github.io
Surgical scene understanding is crucial for computer-assisted intervention systems, requiring visual comprehension of surgical scenes that involves diverse elements such as surgical tools, anatomical structures, and their interactions. To effectively represent the complex information in surgical scenes, graph-based approaches have been explored to structurally model surgical entities and their relationships. Previous surgical scene graph studies have demonstrated the feasibility of representing surgical scenes using graphs. However, certain aspects of surgical scenes-such as diverse combinations of tool-action-target and the identity of the hand operating the tool-remain underexplored in graph-based representations, despite their importance. To incorporate these aspects into graph representations, we propose Endoscapes-SG201 dataset, which includes annotations for tool-action-target combinations and hand identity. We also introduce SSG-Com, a graph-based method designed to learn and represent these critical elements. Through experiments on downstream tasks such as critical view of safety assessment and action triplet recognition, we demonstrated the importance of integrating these
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown significant potential in surgical scene analysis, yet existing models are limited by frame-level datasets and lack high-quality video data with procedural surgical knowledge. To address these challenges, we make the following contributions: (i) SurgPub-Video, a comprehensive dataset of over 3,000 surgical videos and 25 million annotated frames across 11 specialties, sourced from peer-reviewed clinical journals, (ii) SurgLLaVA-Video, a specialized VLM for surgical video understanding, built upon the TinyLLaVA-Video architecture that supports both video-level and frame-level inputs, and (iii) a video-level surgical Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark, covering diverse 11 surgical specialities, such as vascular, cardiology, and thoracic. Extensive experiments, conducted on the proposed benchmark and three additional surgical downstream tasks (action recognition, skill assessment, and triplet recognition), show that SurgLLaVA-Video significantly outperforms both general-purpose and surgical-specific VLMs with only three billion parameters. The dataset, model, and benchmark will be released to enable further advancements in surgical video u
Modern operating room is becoming increasingly complex, requiring innovative intra-operative support systems. While the focus of surgical data science has largely been on video analysis, integrating surgical computer vision with language capabilities is emerging as a necessity. Our work aims to advance Visual Question Answering (VQA) in the surgical context with scene graph knowledge, addressing two main challenges in the current surgical VQA systems: removing question-condition bias in the surgical VQA dataset and incorporating scene-aware reasoning in the surgical VQA model design. First, we propose a Surgical Scene Graph-based dataset, SSG-QA, generated by employing segmentation and detection models on publicly available datasets. We build surgical scene graphs using spatial and action information of instruments and anatomies. These graphs are fed into a question engine, generating diverse QA pairs. Our SSG-QA dataset provides a more complex, diverse, geometrically grounded, unbiased, and surgical action-oriented dataset compared to existing surgical VQA datasets. We then propose SSG-QA-Net, a novel surgical VQA model incorporating a lightweight Scene-embedded Interaction Module
In this work, we focus on boosting the feature extraction to improve the performance of Structure-from-Motion (SfM) in endoscopy videos. We present SuperPoint-E, a new local feature extraction method that, using our proposed Tracking Adaptation supervision strategy, significantly improves the quality of feature detection and description in endoscopy. Extensive experimentation on real endoscopy recordings studies our approach's most suitable configuration and evaluates SuperPoint-E feature quality. The comparison with other baselines also shows that our 3D reconstructions are denser and cover more and longer video segments because our detector fires more densely and our features are more likely to survive (i.e. higher detection precision). In addition, our descriptor is more discriminative, making the guided matching step almost redundant. The presented approach brings significant improvements in the 3D reconstructions obtained, via SfM on endoscopy videos, compared to the original SuperPoint and the gold standard SfM COLMAP pipeline.
Forecasting surgical instrument trajectories and predicting the next surgical action recently started to attract attention from the research community. Both these tasks are crucial for automation and assistance in endoscopy surgery. Given the safety-critical nature of these tasks, reliable uncertainty quantification is essential. Conformal prediction is a fast-growing and widely recognized framework for uncertainty estimation in machine learning and computer vision, offering distribution-free, theoretically valid prediction intervals. In this work, we explore the application of standard conformal prediction and conformalized quantile regression to estimate uncertainty in forecasting surgical instrument motion, i.e., predicting direction and magnitude of surgical instruments' future motion. We analyze and compare their coverage and interval sizes, assessing the impact of multiple hypothesis testing and correction methods. Additionally, we show how these techniques can be employed to produce useful uncertainty heatmaps. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study applying conformal prediction to surgical guidance, marking an initial step toward constructing principled predi
Surgical video understanding is essential for computer-assisted interventions, yet existing surgical foundation models remain constrained by limited data scale, procedural diversity, and inconsistent evaluation, often lacking a reproducible training pipeline. We propose SurgRec, a scalable and reproducible pretraining recipe for surgical video understanding, instantiated with two variants: SurgRec-MAE and SurgRec-JEPA. We curate a large multi-source corpus of 10,535 videos and 214.5M frames spanning endoscopy, laparoscopy, cataract, and robotic surgery. Building on this corpus, we develop a unified pretraining pipeline with balanced sampling and standardize a reproducible benchmark across 16 downstream datasets and four clinical domains with consistent data splits. Across extensive comparisons against SSL baselines and vision-language models, SurgRec consistently achieves superior performance across downstream datasets. In contrast, VLMs prove unreliable for fine-grained temporal recognition, exhibiting both performance gaps and sensitivity to prompt phrasing. Our work provides a reproducible, scalable foundation for the community to build more general surgical video models. All co
Surgical scenes convey crucial information about the quality of surgery. Pixel-wise localization of tools and anatomical structures is the first task towards deeper surgical analysis for microscopic or endoscopic surgical views. This is typically done via fully-supervised methods which are annotation greedy and in several cases, demanding medical expertise. Considering the profusion of surgical videos obtained through standardized surgical workflows, we propose an annotation-efficient framework for the semantic segmentation of surgical scenes. We employ image-based self-supervised object discovery to identify the most salient tools and anatomical structures in surgical videos. These proposals are further refined within a minimally supervised fine-tuning step. Our unsupervised setup reinforced with only 36 annotation labels indicates comparable localization performance with fully-supervised segmentation models. Further, leveraging surgical phase labels as weak labels can better guide model attention towards surgical tools, leading to $\sim 2\%$ improvement in tool localization. Extensive ablation studies on the CaDIS dataset validate the effectiveness of our proposed solution in dis
Realistic and interactive surgical simulation has the potential to facilitate crucial applications, such as medical professional training and autonomous surgical agent training. In the natural visual domain, world models have enabled action-controlled data generation, demonstrating the potential to train autonomous agents in interactive simulated environments when large-scale real data acquisition is infeasible. However, such works in the surgical domain have been limited to simplified computer simulations, and lack realism. Furthermore, existing literature in world models has predominantly dealt with action-labeled data, limiting their applicability to real-world surgical data, where obtaining action annotation is prohibitively expensive. Inspired by the recent success of Genie in leveraging unlabeled video game data to infer latent actions and enable action-controlled data generation, we propose the first surgical vision world model. The proposed model can generate action-controllable surgical data and the architecture design is verified with extensive experiments on the unlabeled SurgToolLoc-2022 dataset. Codes and implementation details are available at https://github.com/bhatt
Imitation learning (IL) has shown immense promise in enabling autonomous dexterous manipulation, including learning surgical tasks. To fully unlock the potential of IL for surgery, access to clinical datasets is needed, which unfortunately lack the kinematic data required for current IL approaches. A promising source of large-scale surgical demonstrations is monocular surgical videos available online, making monocular pose estimation a crucial step toward enabling large-scale robot learning. Toward this end, we propose SurgiPose, a differentiable rendering based approach to estimate kinematic information from monocular surgical videos, eliminating the need for direct access to ground truth kinematics. Our method infers tool trajectories and joint angles by optimizing tool pose parameters to minimize the discrepancy between rendered and real images. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct experiments on two robotic surgical tasks: tissue lifting and needle pickup, using the da Vinci Research Kit Si (dVRK Si). We train imitation learning policies with both ground truth measured kinematics and estimated kinematics from video and compare their performance. Our results
Online surgical phase recognition (SPR) underpins context-aware operating-room systems and requires committing to a prediction at every frame from past context alone. Surgical video poses three demands that natural-video recognizers do not jointly address: procedures span tens of thousands of frames, time flows non-uniformly as long routine stretches are punctuated by brief phase-defining transitions, and the visual domain is narrow so backbone features are strongly correlated across channels. Existing recognizers either let per-frame cost grow with elapsed length, or hold cost bounded but advance state at a uniform rate with channel-independent dynamics, leaving the latter two demands unaddressed. We present SurgicalMamba, a causal SPR model built on Mamba2's structured state-space duality (SSD) that holds per-frame cost at O(d). It introduces three SSD-compatible components that jointly address these demands: a dual-path SSD block that separates long- and short-term regimes at the level of recurrent state; intensity-modulated stepping, a continuous-time time-warp that adapts the slow path's effective rate to phase-relevant information; and state regramming, a per-chunk Cayley rot
Conversation agents powered by large language models are revolutionizing the way we interact with visual data. Recently, large vision-language models (LVLMs) have been extensively studied for both images and videos. However, these studies typically focus on common scenarios. In this work, we introduce an LVLM specifically designed for surgical scenarios. We integrate visual representations of surgical images and videos into the language feature space. Consequently, we establish a LVLM model, Surgical-LLaVA, fine-tuned on instruction following data of surgical scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate that Surgical-LLaVA exhibits impressive multi-modal chat abilities in surgical contexts, occasionally displaying multi-modal behaviors on unseen instructions. We conduct a quantitative evaluation of visual question-answering datasets for surgical scenarios. The results show superior performance compared to previous works, indicating the potential of our model to tackle more complex surgery scenarios.
Miniaturized endoscopy has advanced accurate visual perception within the human body. Prevailing research remains limited to conventional cameras employing convex lenses, where the physical constraints with millimetre-scale thickness impose serious impediments on the micro-level clinical. Recently, with the emergence of meta-optics, ultra-micro imaging based on metalenses (micron-scale) has garnered great attention, serving as a promising solution. However, due to the physical difference of metalens, there is a large gap in data acquisition and algorithm research. In light of this, we aim to bridge this unexplored gap, advancing the novel metalens endoscopy. First, we establish datasets for metalens endoscopy and conduct preliminary optical simulation, identifying two derived optical issues that physically adhere to strong optical priors. Second, we propose MetaScope, a novel optics-driven neural network tailored for metalens endoscopy driven by physical optics. MetaScope comprises two novel designs: Optics-informed Intensity Adjustment (OIA), rectifying intensity decay by learning optical embeddings, and Optics-informed Chromatic Correction (OCC), mitigating chromatic aberration b
The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) is the latest generation foundation model for image and video segmentation. Trained on the expansive Segment Anything Video (SA-V) dataset, which comprises 35.5 million masks across 50.9K videos, SAM 2 advances its predecessor's capabilities by supporting zero-shot segmentation through various prompts (e.g., points, boxes, and masks). Its robust zero-shot performance and efficient memory usage make SAM 2 particularly appealing for surgical tool segmentation in videos, especially given the scarcity of labeled data and the diversity of surgical procedures. In this study, we evaluate the zero-shot video segmentation performance of the SAM 2 model across different types of surgeries, including endoscopy and microscopy. We also assess its performance on videos featuring single and multiple tools of varying lengths to demonstrate SAM 2's applicability and effectiveness in the surgical domain. We found that: 1) SAM 2 demonstrates a strong capability for segmenting various surgical videos; 2) When new tools enter the scene, additional prompts are necessary to maintain segmentation accuracy; and 3) Specific challenges inherent to surgical videos can impa
Generative models hold promise for revolutionizing medical education, robot-assisted surgery, and data augmentation for machine learning. Despite progress in generating 2D medical images, the complex domain of clinical video generation has largely remained untapped.This paper introduces \model, an innovative approach to generate medical videos that simulate clinical endoscopy scenes. We present a novel generative model design that integrates a meticulously crafted spatial-temporal video transformer with advanced 2D vision foundation model priors, explicitly modeling spatial-temporal dynamics during video generation. We also pioneer the first public benchmark for endoscopy simulation with video generation models, adapting existing state-of-the-art methods for this endeavor.Endora demonstrates exceptional visual quality in generating endoscopy videos, surpassing state-of-the-art methods in extensive testing. Moreover, we explore how this endoscopy simulator can empower downstream video analysis tasks and even generate 3D medical scenes with multi-view consistency. In a nutshell, Endora marks a notable breakthrough in the deployment of generative AI for clinical endoscopy research, se
Despite the availability of computer-aided simulators and recorded videos of surgical procedures, junior residents still heavily rely on experts to answer their queries. However, expert surgeons are often overloaded with clinical and academic workloads and limit their time in answering. For this purpose, we develop a surgical question-answering system to facilitate robot-assisted surgical scene and activity understanding from recorded videos. Most of the existing VQA methods require an object detector and regions based feature extractor to extract visual features and fuse them with the embedded text of the question for answer generation. However, (1) surgical object detection model is scarce due to smaller datasets and lack of bounding box annotation; (2) current fusion strategy of heterogeneous modalities like text and image is naive; (3) the localized answering is missing, which is crucial in complex surgical scenarios. In this paper, we propose Visual Question Localized-Answering in Robotic Surgery (Surgical-VQLA) to localize the specific surgical area during the answer prediction. To deal with the fusion of the heterogeneous modalities, we design gated vision-language embedding
Graph-based holistic scene representations facilitate surgical workflow understanding and have recently demonstrated significant success. However, this task is often hindered by the limited availability of densely annotated surgical scene data. In this work, we introduce an end-to-end framework for the generation and optimization of surgical scene graphs on a downstream task. Our approach leverages the flexibility of graph-based spectral clustering and the generalization capability of foundation models to generate unsupervised scene graphs with learnable properties. We reinforce the initial spatial graph with sparse temporal connections using local matches between consecutive frames to predict temporally consistent clusters across a temporal neighborhood. By jointly optimizing the spatiotemporal relations and node features of the dynamic scene graph with the downstream task of phase segmentation, we address the costly and annotation-burdensome task of semantic scene comprehension and scene graph generation in surgical videos using only weak surgical phase labels. Further, by incorporating effective intermediate scene representation disentanglement steps within the pipeline, our sol
Recorded videos from surgeries have become an increasingly important information source for the field of medical endoscopy, since the recorded footage shows every single detail of the surgery. However, while video recording is straightforward these days, automatic content indexing - the basis for content-based search in a medical video archive - is still a great challenge due to the very special video content. In this work, we investigate segmentation and recognition of surgical instruments in videos recorded from laparoscopic gynecology. More precisely, we evaluate the achievable performance of segmenting surgical instruments from their background by using a region-based fully convolutional network for instance-aware (1) instrument segmentation as well as (2) instrument recognition. While the first part addresses only binary segmentation of instances (i.e., distinguishing between instrument or background) we also investigate multi-class instrument recognition (i.e., identifying the type of instrument). Our evaluation results show that even with a moderately low number of training examples, we are able to localize and segment instrument regions with a pretty high accuracy. However,