DefSynUS: Real-time Patient-specific Intrahepatic Vessel Identification via Deformation-Aware CT-US Domain Adaptation

Purpose: Laparoscopic ultrasound (LUS) enhances the safety of liver surgery by visualizing intrahepatic vessels in real-time. Still, vessel identification remains difficult due to probe constraints, complex vascular structure, and tissue deformation. This work aims to enable real-time, patient-specific vessel identification that remains robust under deformation through deformable ultrasound augmentation. Methods: Preoperative CT vessel annotations are used to generate synthetic ultrasound data via optimized physics-based rendering, coupled with domain adaptation to intraoperative ultrasound. The rendering is trained end-to-end for vessel identification and patient-specificity, eliminating the need for preoperative ultrasound. A deformation-aware augmentation simulates realistic intraoperative motion and tissue deformation within the rendering pipeline. Results: In abdominal phantom and limited clinical feasibility experiments (single-case clinical evaluation), the framework achieved real-time intrahepatic vessel-branch identification, maintaining performance under new patient poses. Conclusion: The framework enables real-time vessel identification without preoperative ultrasound and supports technical feasibility, but multi-patient validation is still needed for generalizability and clinical feasibility.

SA4Depth: Consistent Pose-Depth Scale Alignment for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Self-supervised depth estimation from monocular sequences relies on the joint learning of a depth and a pose network. Despite abundant research done to improve the depth network, efforts on the pose remain limited. In this context, even when depth is estimated up to scale, we highlight the importance of the alignment between the scene scales estimated by the pose and depth nets. Then, we introduce SA4Depth, an approach to improve this alignment and boost the depth predictions while keeping the inference time unchanged. Our proposed method uses the depth estimated during training to reproject learnable visual features across consecutive frames and refine the pose estimates by reducing feature alignment residuals. With our method, the estimated scene scales by the separate depth and pose networks are aligned, and the prediction scale consistency is improved across different sequences. Our differentiable refinement integrates seamlessly into existing self-supervised pipelines and substantially improves their depth estimates. We demonstrate this with extensive experiments both outdoors and indoors on KITTI, Cityscapes, and NYUv2. Additionally, results on KITTI Odometry confirm the effectiveness of our pose refinement. Our code is available at https://github.com/Runningchauncey/SA4Depth .

Measuring Prediction Uncertainty in Neural Cellular Automata

Neural cellular automata (NCA) provide a lightweight alternative to encoder-decoder segmentation networks. However, it can be difficult to decide when a prediction should be trusted. Here, we study uncertainty estimation for NCA-based medical image segmentation without modifying the underlying architecture or retraining the model. Our approach is motivated by viewing the NCA as a dynamical system where convergent attractors correspond to confident predictions. Concretely, we propose resilience, a simple measure that leverages the intrinsic iterative structure of NCAs by probing the stability of the final prediction under small perturbations of the automaton state. Predictions that return to the same solution are deemed confident, while those that change substantially are flagged as uncertain. We evaluate uncertainty by its ability to predict segmentation quality using selective prediction metrics ($Δ$Dice@90 and AURC) and ranking metrics (AUROC and AUPRC). Across multiple medical segmentation benchmarks, resilience identifies failure cases more reliably than baselines, improving trust and safety in NCA-based models.

Millimeter-wave Imaging for Anthropometric Body Measurement

Body shape and circumferences are clinically informative biomarkers for risk stratification, including measures such as waist to hip ratio, limb and trunk girths, yet conventional tools such as manual tape measures and optical scanners often require undressing and sustained poses. These demands slow workflows, compromise dignity, and exclude many older adults and people with limited mobility. To make measurement fast and contactless, we leverage millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar, which preserves privacy and operates through typical clothing, enabling quick full-body acquisition. In this work, we present a new optimization-based framework to recover 3D human shape and extract a comprehensive set of anthropometric measurements from volumetric mmWave data. Our method introduces a weighted registration pipeline that fits a parametric body model (SMPL) directly to the noisy mmWave point cloud. The core of our contribution is a vertex-weighting strategy that modulates a Chamfer energy function for reliable surface alignment and noise elimination. We further stabilize the fit by incorporating a foot-ground plane constraint and pose priors, optimizing directly for the SMPL parameters. Together, these components enable a fast, privacy preserving workflow that delivers high fidelity body shape and measurements through clothing without cameras or disrobing and with minimal cooperation, supporting frequent risk oriented assessments in clinics and care facilities for patients of all ages and mobility levels.

SurgOnAir: Hierarchy-Aware Real-Time Surgical Video Commentary

Understanding surgical workflow in real time is fundamental for intelligent surgical embodiment, where AI systems continuously perceive and respond as surgery proceeds. In the operating room, critical decisions depend on subtle, moment-to-moment changes, such as fine instrument movements and evolving tissue states, where even slight perceptual delays can limit assistance or compromise safety. Yet existing methods remain offline or operate at coarse temporal scales, generating descriptions only after processing clips, preventing immediate reaction. We address this by proposing SurgOnAir, a streaming vision-language model that processes frames sequentially without future access and progressively generates narration tokens as visual input arrives. SurgOnAir achieves fine-grained frame-to-token generation, enabling instant responsiveness to evolving surgical dynamics. Built upon our curated hierarchical dataset SurgOnAir-11k spanning action-, step-, and phase-level supervision, the model is trained to produce multi-level textual responses that reflect the inherent hierarchy of surgical procedures. Furthermore, special transition tokens are generated to explicitly mark state changes, allowing SurgOnAir to capture and signal key workflow transitions as they occur. Experiments show that SurgOnAir enables real-time understanding through a single vision-language model that unifies streaming across multiple hierarchies of the surgical workflow, generating superior and hierarchy-aware narrations. Code and dataset will be public.

Physics-Based iOCT Sonification for Real-time Interaction Awareness in Subretinal Injection

Subretinal injection is a delicate vitreoretinal procedure requiring precise needle placement within the subretinal space while avoiding perforation of the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), a layer directly beneath the target with extremely limited regenerative capacity. To enhance depth perception during cannula advancement, intraoperative optical coherence tomography (iOCT) offers high-resolution cross-sectional visualization of needle-tissue interaction; however, interpreting these images requires sustained visual attention alongside the en face microscope view, thereby increasing cognitive load during critical phases and placing additional demands on the surgeon's proprioceptive control. In this paper, we propose a structured, real-time sonification framework designed for extensible mapping of iOCT-derived anatomical features into perceptual auditory feedback. The method employs a physics-inspired acoustic model driven by segmented retinal layers from a stream of iOCT B-scans, with needle motion and injection-induced retinal layer displacements serving as excitation inputs to the sound model, enabling perception of tool position and retinal deformation. In a controlled user study (n=34), the proposed sonification achieved high retinal layer identification accuracy and robust detection of retinal deformation-related events, significantly outperforming a state-of-the-art baseline in overall event identification (83.4% vs. 60.6%, p < 0.001), with gains driven primarily by enhanced detection of injection-induced retinal deformation. Evaluation by experts (n=4) confirmed the clinical relevance and potential intraoperative applicability of the method. These results establish structured iOCT sonification as a viable complementary modality for real-time surgical guidance in subretinal injection.

OpenGaFF: Open-Vocabulary Gaussian Feature Field with Codebook Attention

Understanding open-vocabulary 3D scenes with Gaussian-based representations remains challenging due to fragmented and spatially inconsistent semantic predictions across multi-view observations. In this paper, we present OpenGaFF, a novel framework for open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding built upon 3D Gaussian Splatting. At the core of our method is a Gaussian Feature Field that models semantics as a continuous function of Gaussian geometry and appearance. By explicitly conditioning semantic predictions on geometric structure, this formulation strengthens the coupling between geometry and semantics, leading to improved spatial coherence across similar structures in 3D space. To further enforce object-level semantic consistency, we introduce a structured codebook that serves as a set of shared semantic primitives. Furthermore, a codebook-guided attention mechanism is proposed to retrieve language features via similarity matching between query embeddings and learned codebook entries, enabling robust open-vocabulary reasoning while reducing intra-object feature variance. Extensive experiments on standard 2D and 3D open-vocabulary benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms prior approaches, achieving improved segmentation quality, stronger 3D semantic consistency and a semantically interpretable codebook that provides insight into the learned representation.

Multivariate Gaussian NeRF for Wide Field-of-View Ultrasound Reconstruction

Wide Field-of-View (WFoV) reconstruction enhances 3D ultrasound imaging by providing valuable anatomical context for segmentation models and visualization. Clinical ultrasound volumes are predominantly acquired using convex probes, which generate expanding, diverging acoustic beams to maximize anatomical coverage. Stitching these sweeps together traditionally introduces significant compounding artifacts and aliasing due to depth-dependent resolution changes. Here, we introduce Ultra-Wide-NeRF, a Multivariate 3D Gaussian (MVG) NeRF-based method for WFoV ultrasound reconstruction. By explicitly modeling the complex beam geometry using distance-dependent convex volumetric sampling and anisotropic 3D Gaussians, our method inherently mitigates these compounding artifacts and provides anti-aliasing. Beyond simply reconstructing a static 3D grid, our NeRF-based approach yields a continuous neural representation of the tissue, enabling the synthesis of high-fidelity novel views from arbitrary virtual trajectories. We validate Ultra-Wide-NeRF for intracardiac echocardiography on phantom and porcine datasets, demonstrating that our method expands the spatial context important in intraoperative navigation. Code will be open-sourced upon publication.

Open-H-Embodiment: A Large-Scale Dataset for Enabling Foundation Models in Medical Robotics

Autonomous medical robots hold promise to improve patient outcomes, reduce provider workload, democratize access to care, and enable superhuman precision. However, autonomous medical robotics has been limited by a fundamental data problem: existing medical robotic datasets are small, single-embodiment, and rarely shared openly, restricting the development of foundation models that the field needs to advance. We introduce Open-H-Embodiment, the largest open dataset of medical robotic video with synchronized kinematics to date, spanning more than 49 institutions and multiple robotic platforms including the CMR Versius, Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci, da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK), Rob Surgical BiTrack, Virtual Incision's MIRA, Moon Surgical Maestro, and a variety of custom systems, spanning surgical manipulation, robotic ultrasound, and endoscopy procedures. We demonstrate the research enabled by this dataset through two foundation models. GR00T-H is the first open foundation vision-language-action model for medical robotics, which is the only evaluated model to achieve full end-to-end task completion on a structured suturing benchmark (25% of trials vs. 0% for all others) and achieves 64% average success across a 29-step ex vivo suturing sequence. We also train Cosmos-H-Surgical-Simulator, the first action-conditioned world model to enable multi-embodiment surgical simulation from a single checkpoint, spanning nine robotic platforms and supporting in silico policy evaluation and synthetic data generation for the medical domain. These results suggest that open, large-scale medical robot data collection can serve as critical infrastructure for the research community, enabling advances in robot learning, world modeling, and beyond.

From Adaptation to Generalization: Adaptive Visual Prompting for Medical Image Segmentation

Visual prompting has emerged as a powerful method for adapting pre-trained models to new domains without updating model parameters. However, existing prompting methods typically optimize a single prompt per domain and apply it uniformly to all inputs, limiting their ability to generalize under intra and inter-domain variability, which is especially critical in the medical field. To address this, we propose APEX, an Adaptive Prompt EXtraction framework that retrieves input-specific prompts from a learnable prompt memory. The memory stores diverse, domain-discriminative prompt representations and is queried via domain features extracted from the Fourier spectrum. To learn robust and discriminative domain features, we introduce a novel Low-Frequency Feature Contrastive (LFC) learning framework that clusters representations from the same domain while separating those from different domains. Extensive experiments on two medical segmentation tasks demonstrate that APEX significantly improves generalization across both seen and unseen domains. Furthermore, it complements any existing backbones and consistently enhances performance, confirming its effectiveness as a plug-and-play prompting solution in medical fields. The code is available at https://github.com/cetinkayaevren/apex/