surgical device manufacturers

Abstract: In minimally invasive surgery (MIS), maintaining an appropriate field of view (FoV) is essential for surgical safety and efficiency. However, conventional autonomous laparoscope control methods often treat visual tracking and surgical phase recognition independently, limiting robustness under occlusion, entity overlap, and camera motion. This paper proposes a closed-loop autonomous laparoscope control framework that couples real-time surgical phase recognition with camera-motion-compensated visual perception. By exploiting phase-dependent relationships among surgical entities, the framework improves target state estimation under challenging visual conditions, supporting task-aware autonomous FoV control. Experiments on benchmark datasets evaluate the proposed framework in surgical phase recognition and target tracking, including scenarios involving occlusion and entity overlap. Phantom experiments further demonstrate the feasibility of autonomous FoV control, showing improved target visibility and task execution performance compared with fixed-FoV control. These results highlight the potential of incorporating task-level semantics into visual state estimation for autonomous laparoscope guidance.

Abstract: Objective. To evaluate whether spatial context and temporal modeling improve tissue recognition during optical trocar entry, where multiple abdominal-wall tissues may be visible simultaneously. Methods. We retrospectively analyzed 71 recordings with 1,516 annotated keyframes and 29,151 clinician-annotated sectors. Each frame was divided into 28 polar-grid sectors assigned to nine tissue classes. Color, neighboring-sector, and positional features were used by a gradient-boosted emission classifier. The full pipeline added learned temporal smoothing, spatial regularization, an anatomically ordered hidden Markov model, and posterior blending. Five-fold cross-validation was grouped by recording, with cross-fitting to prevent within-recording leakage. Primary evaluation used clinician-derived targets; ablations assessed classification, probability quality, spatial consistency, and peritoneum-or-deeper onset timing. Results. The complete pipeline achieved accuracy 0.646, macro-F1 0.507, and macro-AUROC 0.882, versus 0.600, 0.440, and 0.861 for emissions alone. Macro-F1 improved by 0.066 across all five folds. Label changes decreased from 66.2 to 19.5 per sector-minute, and median onset error decreased from 15.58 to 2.45 seconds. Frames with a tissue-depth-code span of at least three decreased from 53% to 26%, versus 22% for clinician annotations. Performance remained limited for preperitoneal fat and bowel, and the full model retained a 44% premature-onset proportion. Conclusions. Combining appearance, spatial context, and temporal constraints improved retrospective tissue recognition and onset localization. Tissue-specific limitations, residual timing errors, and reliance on future observations warrant external validation and prospective evaluation of causal models before clinical use.

Abstract: Excessive force may damage tissue and increase the risk of anastomotic leakage in robotic colorectal surgery. Although the da Vinci 5 provides force sensing, this capability is unavailable on earlier da Vinci systems and many other surgical robotic platforms. In this work, we present a vision-based pipeline for estimating 3D interaction forces from soft-tissue deformation in stereo endoscopic video. We dynamically reconstruct the tissue point cloud in an object-centered coordinate frame, track tissue points with geometric constraints, and predict the 3D force vector with a neural network. We progressively evaluate the pipeline on rubber-glove phantoms, ex vivo porcine colons, and in vivo colorectal surgical video sequences. Under varying tissue orientations and positions within the endoscopic view, as well as different camera viewpoints, the proposed method achieves average root mean square error (RMSEs) of 0.77 N and 1.30 N on the phantom and porcine colon, respectively. Compared with the camera-frame representation, the object-centered representation reduces average RMSE by 51.3% and 56.7%, while geometry-constrained tracking reduces RMSE by 19.8% and 25.3% compared with CoTracker. We further qualitatively demonstrate the feasibility of vision-based force estimation on an in vivo colorectal surgical sequence, as a step toward clinical translation of vision-based, sensorless force estimation.