Harnessing Foundation Models for Robust and Generalizable 6-DOF Bronchoscopy Localization

Vision-based 6-DOF bronchoscopy localization offers a promising solution for accurate and cost-effective interventional guidance. However, existing methods struggle with 1) limited generalization across patient cases due to scarce labeled data, and 2) poor robustness under visual degradation, as bronchoscopy procedures frequently involve artifacts such as occlusions and motion blur that impair visual information. To address these challenges, we propose PANSv2, a generalizable and robust bronchoscopy localization framework. Motivated by PANS that leverages multiple visual cues for pose likelihood measurement, PANSv2 integrates depth estimation, landmark detection, and centerline constraints into a unified pose optimization framework that evaluates pose probability and solves for the optimal bronchoscope pose. To further enhance generalization capabilities, we leverage the endoscopic foundation model EndoOmni for depth estimation and the video foundation model EndoMamba for landmark detection, incorporating both spatial and temporal analyses. Pretrained on diverse endoscopic datasets, these models provide stable and transferable visual representations, enabling reliable performance across varied bronchoscopy scenarios. Additionally, to improve robustness to visual degradation, we introduce an automatic re-initialization module that detects tracking failures and re-establishes pose using landmark detections once clear views are available. Experimental results on bronchoscopy dataset encompassing 10 patient cases show that PANSv2 achieves the highest tracking success rate, with an 18.1% improvement in SR-5 (percentage of absolute trajectory error under 5 mm) compared to existing methods, showing potential towards real clinical usage.

Nemotron-H: A Family of Accurate and Efficient Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Models

As inference-time scaling becomes critical for enhanced reasoning capabilities, it is increasingly becoming important to build models that are efficient to infer. We introduce Nemotron-H, a family of 8B and 56B/47B hybrid Mamba-Transformer models designed to reduce inference cost for a given accuracy level. To achieve this goal, we replace the majority of self-attention layers in the common Transformer model architecture with Mamba layers that perform constant computation and require constant memory per generated token. We show that Nemotron-H models offer either better or on-par accuracy compared to other similarly-sized state-of-the-art open-sourced Transformer models (e.g., Qwen-2.5-7B/72B and Llama-3.1-8B/70B), while being up to 3$\times$ faster at inference. To further increase inference speed and reduce the memory required at inference time, we created Nemotron-H-47B-Base from the 56B model using a new compression via pruning and distillation technique called MiniPuzzle. Nemotron-H-47B-Base achieves similar accuracy to the 56B model, but is 20% faster to infer. In addition, we introduce an FP8-based training recipe and show that it can achieve on par results with BF16-based training. This recipe is used to train the 56B model. All Nemotron-H models will be released, with support in Hugging Face, NeMo, and Megatron-LM.

Bayesian Test-Time Adaptation for Vision-Language Models

Test-time adaptation with pre-trained vision-language models, such as CLIP, aims to adapt the model to new, potentially out-of-distribution test data. Existing methods calculate the similarity between visual embedding and learnable class embeddings, which are initialized by text embeddings, for zero-shot image classification. In this work, we first analyze this process based on Bayes theorem, and observe that the core factors influencing the final prediction are the likelihood and the prior. However, existing methods essentially focus on adapting class embeddings to adapt likelihood, but they often ignore the importance of prior. To address this gap, we propose a novel approach, \textbf{B}ayesian \textbf{C}lass \textbf{A}daptation (BCA), which in addition to continuously updating class embeddings to adapt likelihood, also uses the posterior of incoming samples to continuously update the prior for each class embedding. This dual updating mechanism allows the model to better adapt to distribution shifts and achieve higher prediction accuracy. Our method not only surpasses existing approaches in terms of performance metrics but also maintains superior inference rates and memory usage, making it highly efficient and practical for real-world applications.

Accelerated Quasi-Static FEM for Real-Time Modeling of Continuum Robots with Multiple Contacts and Large Deformation

Continuum robots offer high flexibility and multiple degrees of freedom, making them ideal for navigating narrow lumens. However, accurately modeling their behavior under large deformations and frequent environmental contacts remains challenging. Current methods for solving the deformation of these robots, such as the Model Order Reduction and Gauss-Seidel (GS) methods, suffer from significant drawbacks. They experience reduced computational speed as the number of contact points increases and struggle to balance speed with model accuracy. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel finite element method (FEM) named Acc-FEM. Acc-FEM employs a large deformation quasi-static finite element model and integrates an accelerated solver scheme to handle multi-contact simulations efficiently. Additionally, it utilizes parallel computing with Graphics Processing Units (GPU) for real-time updates of the finite element models and collision detection. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that Acc-FEM significantly improves computational efficiency in modeling continuum robots with multiple contacts while achieving satisfactory accuracy, addressing the deficiencies of existing methods.

EndoMamba: An Efficient Foundation Model for Endoscopic Videos

Endoscopic video-based tasks, such as visual navigation and surgical phase recognition, play a crucial role in minimally invasive surgeries by providing real-time assistance. While recent video foundation models have shown promise, their applications are hindered by (1) computational inefficiencies and (2) suboptimal performance caused by limited data for pre-training in endoscopy. To address these issues, we present EndoMamba, a foundation model designed for real-time inference while learning generalized spatiotemporal representations. First, to mitigate computational inefficiencies, we propose the EndoMamba backbone, optimized for real-time inference. Inspired by recent advancements in state space models, EndoMamba integrates Bidirectional Mamba blocks for spatial modeling within individual frames and vanilla Mamba blocks for past-to-present reasoning across the temporal domain. This design enables both strong spatiotemporal modeling and efficient inference in online video streams. Second, we propose a self-supervised hierarchical pre-training diagram to enhance EndoMamba's representation learning using endoscopic videos and incorporating general video domain knowledge. Specifically, our approach combines masked reconstruction with auxiliary supervision, leveraging low-level reconstruction to capture spatial-temporal structures and high-level alignment to transfer broader knowledge from a pretrained general-video domain foundation model. Extensive experiments on four downstream tasks--classification, segmentation, surgical phase recognition, and localization--demonstrate that EndoMamba outperforms existing foundation models and task-specific methods while maintaining real-time inference speed. The source code will be released upon acceptance.

USPilot: An Embodied Robotic Assistant Ultrasound System with Large Language Model Enhanced Graph Planner

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), embodied artificial intelligence presents transformative opportunities for robotic manipulation tasks. Ultrasound imaging, a widely used and cost-effective medical diagnostic procedure, faces challenges due to the global shortage of professional sonographers. To address this issue, we propose USPilot, an embodied robotic assistant ultrasound system powered by an LLM-based framework to enable autonomous ultrasound acquisition. USPilot is designed to function as a virtual sonographer, capable of responding to patients' ultrasound-related queries and performing ultrasound scans based on user intent. By fine-tuning the LLM, USPilot demonstrates a deep understanding of ultrasound-specific questions and tasks. Furthermore, USPilot incorporates an LLM-enhanced Graph Neural Network (GNN) to manage ultrasound robotic APIs and serve as a task planner. Experimental results show that the LLM-enhanced GNN achieves unprecedented accuracy in task planning on public datasets. Additionally, the system demonstrates significant potential in autonomously understanding and executing ultrasound procedures. These advancements bring us closer to achieving autonomous and potentially unmanned robotic ultrasound systems, addressing critical resource gaps in medical imaging.

Advancing Dense Endoscopic Reconstruction with Gaussian Splatting-driven Surface Normal-aware Tracking and Mapping

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is essential for precise surgical interventions and robotic tasks in minimally invasive procedures. While recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have improved SLAM with high-quality novel view synthesis and fast rendering, these systems struggle with accurate depth and surface reconstruction due to multi-view inconsistencies. Simply incorporating SLAM and 3DGS leads to mismatches between the reconstructed frames. In this work, we present Endo-2DTAM, a real-time endoscopic SLAM system with 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) to address these challenges. Endo-2DTAM incorporates a surface normal-aware pipeline, which consists of tracking, mapping, and bundle adjustment modules for geometrically accurate reconstruction. Our robust tracking module combines point-to-point and point-to-plane distance metrics, while the mapping module utilizes normal consistency and depth distortion to enhance surface reconstruction quality. We also introduce a pose-consistent strategy for efficient and geometrically coherent keyframe sampling. Extensive experiments on public endoscopic datasets demonstrate that Endo-2DTAM achieves an RMSE of $1.87\pm 0.63$ mm for depth reconstruction of surgical scenes while maintaining computationally efficient tracking, high-quality visual appearance, and real-time rendering. Our code will be released at github.com/lastbasket/Endo-2DTAM.

EndoChat: Grounded Multimodal Large Language Model for Endoscopic Surgery

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated their immense potential in computer-aided diagnosis and decision-making. In the context of robotic-assisted surgery, MLLMs can serve as effective tools for surgical training and guidance. However, there is still a lack of MLLMs specialized for surgical scene understanding in clinical applications. In this work, we introduce EndoChat to address various dialogue paradigms and subtasks in surgical scene understanding that surgeons encounter. To train our EndoChat, we construct the Surg-396K dataset through a novel pipeline that systematically extracts surgical information and generates structured annotations based on collected large-scale endoscopic surgery datasets. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-scale visual token interaction mechanism and a visual contrast-based reasoning mechanism to enhance the model's representation learning and reasoning capabilities. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance across five dialogue paradigms and eight surgical scene understanding tasks. Additionally, we conduct evaluations with professional surgeons, most of whom provide positive feedback on collaborating with EndoChat. Overall, these results demonstrate that our EndoChat has great potential to significantly advance training and automation in robotic-assisted surgery.

Enhancing Bronchoscopy Depth Estimation through Synthetic-to-Real Domain Adaptation

Monocular depth estimation has shown promise in general imaging tasks, aiding in localization and 3D reconstruction. While effective in various domains, its application to bronchoscopic images is hindered by the lack of labeled data, challenging the use of supervised learning methods. In this work, we propose a transfer learning framework that leverages synthetic data with depth labels for training and adapts domain knowledge for accurate depth estimation in real bronchoscope data. Our network demonstrates improved depth prediction on real footage using domain adaptation compared to training solely on synthetic data, validating our approach.

Multi-Stage Airway Segmentation in Lung CT Based on Multi-scale Nested Residual UNet

Accurate and complete segmentation of airways in chest CT images is essential for the quantitative assessment of lung diseases and the facilitation of pulmonary interventional procedures. Although deep learning has led to significant advancements in medical image segmentation, maintaining airway continuity remains particularly challenging. This difficulty arises primarily from the small and dispersed nature of airway structures, as well as class imbalance in CT scans. To address these challenges, we designed a Multi-scale Nested Residual U-Net (MNR-UNet), incorporating multi-scale inputs and Residual Multi-scale Modules (RMM) into a nested residual framework to enhance information flow, effectively capturing the intricate details of small airways and mitigating gradient vanishing. Building on this, we developed a three-stage segmentation pipeline to optimize the training of the MNR-UNet. The first two stages prioritize high accuracy and sensitivity, while the third stage focuses on repairing airway breakages to balance topological completeness and correctness. To further address class imbalance, we introduced a weighted Breakage-Aware Loss (wBAL) to heighten focus on challenging samples, penalizing breakages and thereby extending the length of the airway tree. Additionally, we proposed a hierarchical evaluation framework to offer more clinically meaningful analysis. Validation on both in-house and public datasets demonstrates that our approach achieves superior performance in detecting more accurate airway voxels and identifying additional branches, significantly improving airway topological completeness. The code will be released publicly following the publication of the paper.