Feature-EndoGaussian: Feature Distilled Gaussian Splatting in Surgical Deformable Scene Reconstruction

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has transformed clinical practice by reducing recovery times, minimizing complications, and enhancing precision. Nonetheless, MIS inherently relies on indirect visualization and precise instrument control, posing unique challenges. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have enabled real-time surgical scene understanding through techniques such as image classification, object detection, and segmentation, with scene reconstruction emerging as a key element for enhanced intraoperative guidance. Although neural radiance fields (NeRFs) have been explored for this purpose, their substantial data requirements and slow rendering inhibit real-time performance. In contrast, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offers a more efficient alternative, achieving state-of-the-art performance in dynamic surgical scene reconstruction. In this work, we introduce Feature-EndoGaussian (FEG), an extension of 3DGS that integrates 2D segmentation cues into 3D rendering to enable real-time semantic and scene reconstruction. By leveraging pretrained segmentation foundation models, FEG incorporates semantic feature distillation within the Gaussian deformation framework, thereby enhancing both reconstruction fidelity and segmentation accuracy. On the EndoNeRF dataset, FEG achieves superior performance (SSIM of 0.97, PSNR of 39.08, and LPIPS of 0.03) compared to leading methods. Additionally, on the EndoVis18 dataset, FEG demonstrates competitive class-wise segmentation metrics while balancing model size and real-time performance.