cs.ROOct 5, 2026

ProCut: Probabilistic Cutting Topology for Autonomous Electrosurgical Tissue Dissection

Authors: Xiao Liang, Fei Liu, Florian Richter, Genie Rubaiyat, Michael Yip

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Abstract

Accurately modeling and tracking the deformation of soft tissue is critical for a wide range of interventional and surgical procedures. However, current methods struggle in scenarios involving topological changes, such as cutting and dissection, due to the inherent non-linearity and discontinuity introduced by explicit changes in connectivity. In this work, we present a novel, fully differentiable framework that enables robust estimation and modeling of topological changes during deformable tracking. Our method introduces a continuous, sigmoid-based formulation to smooth the otherwise discrete event of tissue cutting, making it amenable to gradient-based optimization within a differentiable Position-Based Dynamics (PBD) simulation. To account for uncertainty and improve robustness in the presence of noisy visual data, we incorporate Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) for particle-based probabilistic inference, generating multiple hypotheses for topological state estimation. Building on this foundation, we develop an autonomous dissection algorithm for thin-shell tissues that leverages topological updates to guide closed-loop cutting trajectory control. We evaluate our approach in both simulated and real-world electrosurgical environments, demonstrating significant improvements in topological estimation accuracy and dissection precision over existing methods. Our results highlight the potential of this framework to advance automation in soft-tissue surgical procedures by enabling reliable perception and control in the presence of complex structural changes.

Figures & tables

Fig. 1: Overview of our autonomous tissue dissection system. (Top) The robot performs electrosurgical dissection. (Bottom left) Our method estimates the cutting topology using probabilistic, gradient-based inference on a canonical reference frame. (Bottom right) The estimated topology enables accurate tracking of tissue deformation, providing critical feedback for precise dissection control.
Fig. 2: Key representations that enable differentiable optimization of the cutting topology. (a). A mesh MtM_{t} representing tissue that is manipulated and cut by a robot. (b). In the tissue’s canonical mesh representation M^\hat{M} , a cutting curve SS affects the constraint stiffness of its surrounding mesh edges. Edges that are closer to the curve will have smaller stiffness to achieve similar effect as if the edges are cut.
Fig. 3: Comparison of topology estimation results from three methods. WB roughly predicts the location and shape but lacks accuracy due to wrong optical flow prediction. HB is highly sensitive to observation noise, leading to many outliers. In contrast, our method achieves accurate topology estimation and enables the most realistic tissue state tracking.
Fig. 4: Ablation results of comparing variants of our method initialized with different noise level. Data of Init indicates initalization errors. Gradient-descent method ( GD-LQ ) is sensitive to initialization. Estimation with linear representation ( SVGD-L ) leads to lower accuracy, whereas quadratic representation alone ( SVGD-Q ) is accurate but not robust to larger initialization error. Combining SVGD with a linear to quadratic refinement strategy ( SVGD-LQ ) achieves good accuracy and robustness.
Fig. 5: Comparison of results from open-loop and the proposed method in simulation. (a) ∼\sim (c) cases have target cutting patterns of line, arc, and snake shape shown as the boundaries of two colors. The 1st row shows dissection error over time of 10 repetitions. The open loop method doesn’t execute trajectory accurately and couldn’t separate completely due to errors. The proposed method is able to follow desired pattern accurately.
Fig. 6: This figures shows an example flow of robot autonomous dissection using the proposed method. The robot utilizes the proposed method’s tissue tracking capability to perform electrosurgical dissection. It inevitably makes error due to motion noise and calibration error. Our topology estimation method identifies the dissection error and updates the dissection plan. This process can be repeated until the dissection trajectory is met or when the estimated error is small enough. In this procedure, tissue retraction is tele-operated.

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