Papers for

medical device integrators

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

PulmoWorld models pneumonia progression from mixed clinical data

PulmoWorld: An Asynchronous Multimodal Medical World Model for Longitudinal Pneumonia Dynamics

Abstract: Pneumonia changes across respiration, inflammation, and organ function, while the measurements that describe it arrive at different times and are often incomplete. We introduce PULMOWORLD, a world model for longitudinal pneumonia dynamics that connects asynchronous state estimation, recursive simulation, and evidence-constrained planning. History-aware filtering separates state propagation from observation-driven correction, so a measurement updates the shared belief only when it is observed. That belief supports recursive forecasts of clinical values and modality representations, and summaries of future prognosis. Cap-MBRL searches imagined continuations inside an authorized action set and replaces a frozen fallback only when a candidate meets the risk budget and a predicted-cost margin. On the pneumonia cohort MASS, recursive forecasts are competitive with task-trained sequence models, and simulated future states retain prognostic information. Trained separately on public MIMIC-IV-CXR chest radiographs and clinical trajectories, this model improves prognostic discrimination over latest-value fusion in development and is competitive on long-horizon error on the locked pneumonia panel. In five known-mechanism MASS-Syn environments, Cap-MBRL lowers selection regret relative to direct fallback execution.

Wed 28 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Pneumonia affects different parts of the body in complex ways, and measurements about it often come at different times and may be incomplete. The authors present PulmoWorld, a model that learns to track and predict pneumonia’s changes over time by updating its beliefs only when new data arrives. This lets it make forecasts about future health states and suggest safe treatment plans. Tests show it performs well in predicting patient outcomes and supports better decision-making in simulated settings.
Open → 2610.38289v1

Surgical robot instrument tracking improves with self-training fusion

Robust Surgical Robotic Instrument Tracking via Sequential Multi-Cue Fusion and Sim-to-Real Self-Training

Abstract: Efficient and robust tracking of surgical robotic instruments is important for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery, yet remains challenging due to the complexity of surgical scenes and the unconventional geometry of surgical instruments. Keypoint-based approaches are efficient, but their performance depends on reliable feature detection. Improving these detectors with real-world supervision is difficult because accurate real-world annotations are costly to obtain at scale. To address this limitation, we introduce a tracker-guided self-training framework that adapts a model pretrained on synthetic images to unlabeled real-world videos. Given measured robot joint states, an uncertainty-aware EKF recursively corrects the instrument pose and the observable joint angles by comparing projected model features with detected keypoints, shaft boundaries, and mask-derived cues. An RTS smoother subsequently refines the resulting trajectory, which is projected into pseudo-labels for fine-tuning the feature detector without laborious pose annotations. Experiments on real-world videos demonstrate consistent improvements from self-training across all evaluated keypoint metrics, and the resulting model outperforms prior approaches in both accuracy and runtime. The code and data will be released upon publication.

Sun 4 OctRoboticsComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Tracking surgical tools during robot-assisted surgery is hard because the tools look different and the surgery scene is complex. The authors developed a system that learns from computer-generated images and then improves itself by watching real surgery videos without needing costly manual labels. It uses a smart filter to combine multiple clues about the tool’s position and then fine-tunes a keypoint detector to track instruments more accurately. Their experiments show this approach works better and faster than previous methods.
Open → 2610.05491v1

A gateway ensures safe access to medical device data for AI agents

A Safety-Bounded SDC-to-MCP Gateway for Medical AI Agents

Abstract: The Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides a common interface through which AI applications discover and use external resources and tools. It allows language-model agents to ground their reasoning in current system state and interact with heterogeneous services. In medical environments, however, exposing device state and action affordances requires deterministic constraints on possible effects. We present an IEEE 11073 Service-Oriented Device Connectivity (SDC)-to-MCP gateway that exposes metrics, alarms, context references, and semantic metadata as read-only resources, while representing selected action affordances as policy-validated dry-run tools. The term safety-bounded denotes a narrow no-execution property: agent-facing requests dispatch no SDC device operation. A Python prototype supports simulated fault and lifecycle experiments, a software-reference protocol path spanning independent Java and Python implementations, deterministic baselines, representation ablations, and multi-model agent evaluation. The results show semantically explicit resource exposure, visible rejection of invalid or outdated state, and preservation of the no-execution boundary across resource, proposal, and authorization paths. Explicit semantic metadata improved conformity to required metric identifiers in structured alarm outputs relative to a generic representation, while retained structured-output failures reveal a distinction between plausible narrative answers and task-compliant machine-readable results.

Fri 25 SeptDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingArtificial Intelligence
The gist
In hospitals, AI systems can help by using data from medical devices, but it's important that these AI systems do not accidentally control devices in unsafe ways. The authors created a gateway that lets AI agents read medical device data clearly but prevents them from actually sending commands that could cause harm. Their system shows which data is current and valid while keeping AI from making real changes to devices. This approach helps keep AI interactions with medical equipment safe and reliable.
Open → 2609.31358v1

Test-time augmentation improves calibration of black-box radiology ai

Improving Calibration of Black-Box Radiology AI Using Test-Time Augmentation

Abstract: Radiology AI systems increasingly inform clinical decisions such as triage, follow-up imaging, and treatment planning. For these decisions to be made safely, model outputs must be well calibrated, meaning predicted probabilities accurately reflect true risk. Many standard techniques for improving calibration, such as MC Dropout and Deep Ensembles, require access to model parameters or retraining. However, proprietary clinical AI systems operate as black boxes, preventing access to the model's internals. To that end, we propose a model-agnostic framework for improving calibration of black-box models using clinically grounded test-time augmentation (TTA). Our framework applies geometric and physics-inspired 3D CT perturbations and learns probability-level aggregation strategies without access to model internals or the original training data. Across pulmonary embolism and intracranial hemorrhage detection tasks, DualTTA achieved the strongest overall calibration among TTA methods, reducing the Expected Calibration Error by 54% (0.239 -> 0.109) and 43% (0.051 -> 0.029), respectively, while requiring only input-output access. Additionally, DualTTA outperformed uncertainty estimation techniques that require access to model internals, such as Temperature Scaling, MC Dropout, and Deep Ensembles, in most calibration metrics. These results demonstrate that learned TTA aggregation can improve the calibration of clinical AI systems, providing a practical approach for improving the reliability of black-box medical AI.

Thu 24 SeptMachine LearningHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Radiology AI systems help doctors make important decisions but need to be accurate about how certain they are. The authors found a way to make these AI systems better calibrated without changing the AI itself, by applying smart changes to the images they analyze and combining the results. This method, called DualTTA, works even when the AI is a "black box" and improves the AI's confidence accuracy in detecting health issues like blood clots and brain bleeding. It also performs better than some methods that require access to the AI’s internal settings.
Open → 2609.29931v1

Voice controlled multi-agent system improves smart operating rooms

A Voice-Interactive Multi-Agent System for Smart Operating Rooms: Architecture Design and Key Technologies

Abstract: This paper presents SurgicalRoomAgent, a voice-interactive multi-agent system for smart operating rooms based on large language models (LLMs). The system achieves natural language understanding, device control, intraoperative recording, and surgical report generation through a layered architecture comprising a voice interaction pipeline (wake, ASR, turn detection, agent reasoning, TTS) and an agent core (skill registry, task planner, device manager). Three key technologies are investigated: (1) KV Cache prefix warming for low-latency inference, reducing recomputation overhead from approximately 500 ms to tens of milliseconds via byte-level Longest Common Prefix reuse; (2) streaming partial JSON parsing with early parallel task execution, reducing end-to-end latency by approximately 30%; and (3) progressive skill prompt disclosure, which dynamically filters system prompts based on user role, connected devices, and surgical phase to maximize information density within limited context windows. The system is implemented using the Qwen3-27B model with llama.cpp/sglang inference engines. Experimental analysis demonstrates effective operation within a 16,384-token context limit and multi-device parallel control response times meeting OR real-time requirements.

Thu 10 SeptArtificial IntelligenceComputation and LanguageHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Operating rooms have many devices and need accurate records, but controlling everything by hand can be hard. This paper presents SurgicalRoomAgent, a system that understands spoken commands to control devices, record operations, and make surgical notes automatically. The authors developed techniques to make the system respond quickly and focus on the right information depending on the surgery stage. Their tests show it works efficiently within the limits of current AI models and meets the timing needs of real surgeries.
Open → 2609.11231v1