robotic surgery engineers

Abstract: Microsurgical anastomosis is one of the most challenging and sophisticated procedures for surgical robotics, requiring accurate manipulation of surgical instruments within a limited space to achieve precise operations. Accurate surgical trajectory anticipation is essential for surgical scene understanding, intraoperative planning, robotic manipulation, and reliable behaviour analysis. However, existing approaches mainly focus on features extracted from surgical videos and historical trajectories, while overlooking rich semantic and motion information that can provide more discriminative multi-modal representations for complex surgical instrument-tissue interactions. In this work, we propose a cross-modal feature fusion framework for long-term 2D and 3D microsurgical anastomosis trajectory anticipation. The proposed framework consists of a multi-modal representation extractor and a cross-modal feature fusion network. Semantic recognition of surgical objects and consecutive motion estimation are incorporated as multi-modal visual cues, providing complementary spatial and temporal guidance for instrument-tissue interaction characterization. A coarse-to-fine progressive fusion strategy with a long-short-term memory mechanism is introduced to capture temporal dependencies step by step. The training and evaluation are conducted on our established robotic platform and a comprehensive dataset containing both phantom and ex-vivo surgical scenarios is constructed. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms existing methods and exhibits improved robustness across different surgical scenes, highlighting its potential for both intelligent robot-assisted and autonomous surgical systems.

Abstract: Autonomous colonoscopic navigation can reduce operator burden and the risk of loop formation or tissue trauma, but remains challenging due to deformable anatomy, weak-texture and specular endoscopic visuals, and contact-rich viscoelastic interactions. Existing methods either rely on geometry-driven pipelines, which are efficient and interpretable yet brittle due to manually engineered features and switching logic, or adopt learning-based policies, whose inferred depth/geometry can become temporally inconsistent or overly smooth under weak texture and specular highlights while simulation-trained variants (e.g., deep reinforcement learning) may further suffer from a sim-to-real gap. We propose ColoACT, an autonomous navigation system that integrates an RGB-D-E based Action Chunking Transformer policy (ColoACT policy) for a compact self-propelled Bevel-Gear-Based Endoscopic Robot (BGER). The ColoACT policy augments RGB with estimated relative depth and a gradient-based pseudo-elevation map to enhance fold-ridge saliency and other high-frequency geometric cues, and enables smooth continuous control of the BGER by predicting overlapping action chunks and fusing them via temporal ensembling. In different \textit{ex-vivo} porcine colons (approximately 60 cm), our system achieves success rates of 85.4\% and 72.5\% in straight and curved segments, respectively, and achieves 70\% success in 90-degree turns and 60\% in double-bend sequences, with feasibility further demonstrated in challenging triple-bend segments. The project page is available at: https://Adamhu1.github.io/ColoACT/.

Abstract: Query-based segmentation methods have shown promising potential for surgical instrument segmentation and recognition, which is essential for scene understanding and downstream tasks in computer assisted surgery. However, most existing approaches predominantly rely on per-frame predictions and overlook cross-frame temporal priors as well as temporal-consistency constraints. This limitation often leads to unstable query representations and suboptimal category recognition. In this paper, we propose TEDi, a Temporal memory-Enhanced and Denoising transformer for surgical instrument segmentation that addresses these is sues through Memory Search Enhancement and Temporal Consistency Denoising. The former introduces a query-level memory bank and a memory search enhancement encoder to retrieve discriminative representations from historical frames, enriching current-frame features. The latter constructs a temporally consistent reference as a cross-frame semantic anchor to suppress temporally unstable predictions and promote semantic coherence across frames. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, EndoVis 2017 and EndoVis 2018, demonstrate that TEDi consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its potential to further advance computer-assisted surgery. Our code is available at github.com/argon-xixi/TEDi.