Endoscopy
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9 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.
Latest papers 58
Endoscopic video analysis is essential for gastrointestinal diagnosis and computer-assisted interventions, but video sequences are routinely degraded by specular reflections, motion artifacts, and missing frames. These transient corruptions can distract clinicians, reduce image interpretability, and disrupt downstream tasks such as 3D reconstruction and navigation. Effective restoration therefore requires methods that exploit temporal continuity rather than treating frames in isolation. We introduce a Gaussian Process Prior Variational Autoencoder (GPVAE) framework for endoscopic video restoration that replaces the standard factorized latent prior with a temporal Gaussian process prior, enabling interpolation of missing frames with uncertainty-aware reconstruction. The framework combines endoscopy-specific encoders, including a convolutional EndoVAE backbone and pretrained Vision Transformer encoders from GastroNet-5M, with two scalable GP approximations: Hierarchical Prior Approximation (HPA) and Sparse Precision Approximation (SPA). Specular reflections are handled using a DUCKNet-based masking pipeline that excludes corrupted pixels from the reconstruction objective. On the C3VDv2 colonoscopy dataset, the best GPVAE variants reduced image reconstruction RMSE by 21.9% on average, and by up to 26.1%, relative to matched VAE baselines. Downstream trajectory RMSE was reduced by 12.7% on average across classical visual odometry and a pretrained PoseNet, at an average increase of 27.3% in training time per epoch. Finally, the GP posterior provides per-frame uncertainty estimates that reflect temporal support and offer a confidence signal for restored frames.
Geometry-Consistent Endoscopic Representations for Image-Guided Navigation via Structured Foundation Model Adaptation
Accurate vision-based navigation in monocular endoscopy is difficult due to limited depth cues, weak tissue texture, non-rigid deformation, and substantial appearance variation across domains, all of which complicate pose estimation, depth prediction, and image-to-anatomy alignment. Although recent vision foundation models have shown promise, their learned representations often remain insufficiently geometry-consistent, hindering stable feature correspondence and limiting their reliability for downstream navigation tasks. We propose a unified framework for learning geometry-consistent and domain-robust image representations for monocular endoscopy. The framework combines a synthetic data pipeline that provides accurate geometric supervision with Hierarchy-Aware Geometry-Semantic Adaptation, a structured alternative to standard LoRA that inserts low-rank adapters selectively across the transformer hierarchy and couples them with layer-wise training objectives to encourage geometric correspondence in intermediate features and semantic consistency in deeper features. Experiments on public and proprietary datasets show improved geometric and semantic representation quality, leading to better performance on downstream navigation tasks including pose estimation and monocular depth estimation. The learned representations show favorable synthetic-to-real transfer on clinical bronchoscopy and provide a useful initialization for adaptation to sinus endoscopy and colonoscopy under limited supervision. The framework also shows favorable scaling with model size and training data. These results support hierarchy-aware, geometry-guided adaptation as a practical approach for endoscopic representation learning.
C3VD-DEFCOL: A Deformable Colonoscopy Dataset with Time-Resolved 3D Ground Truth and Realistic Appearance
3D reconstruction could improve colonoscopy by estimating mucosal coverage and alerting clinicians to missed regions during screening. However, algorithm development is limited as no current datasets provide both a realistic in vivo appearance and dense, time-resolved 3D ground truth, especially under non-rigid deformation. We present C3VD-DEFCOL, a framework and dataset for evaluating deformable colonoscopy reconstruction with paired geometry and realistic texture. Starting from C3VD/C3VDv2 colon meshes and camera trajectories, we generate controlled deformations of the colon surface, including peristaltic waves and centerline motion, and render per-frame depth, surface normals, optical flow, camera poses, and time-stamped 3D meshes. We then use the rendered geometry, primarily depth, to condition an LTX-2.3-based sim-to-real translation model that produces RGB clips with in vivo-like mucosal color, texture, vasculature, and specular appearance while preserving the underlying 3D scene structure. The resulting dataset contains 110 videos from 11 unique colon mesh geometries, with varying camera trajectories, appearances, and parameterized deformation regimes, including three peristaltic severity levels that serve as controlled evaluation axes. We evaluate the generated videos using appearance realism, geometric consistency, and temporal consistency metrics, and use the paired ground truth to benchmark the downstream task of pose estimation in deformable 3D reconstruction. Our experiments show how pose estimation error increases with increasing deformation severity, providing a controlled stress test that is not possible with existing in vivo datasets. Overall, C3VD-DEFCOL is designed as a reproducible, quantitative evaluation platform for testing deformable 3D reconstruction algorithms, with the goal of reducing the domain gap between synthetic datasets and in vivo colonoscopy.
Parameter-Efficient VLMs for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy: Medical Image Generation and Clinical Visual Question Answering
The major limitations of gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy AI systems arise from a shortage of annotated data, strict privacy policies, and significant bottlenecks in conventional model fine-tuning. Such limitations impede the successful application of sophisticated AI models in clinical practice, particularly affecting the reliability and scalability of diagnosis. In this paper, we present a dual-pipeline PEFT model that addresses two fundamental problems: medical Visual Question Answering (VQA) and the generation of privacy-preserving synthetic data. For clinical VQA, we adopt the Florence-2 vision-language model. Leveraging PEFT enhances model interpretability while substantially reducing the computational cost of training. Simultaneously, we employ Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with Stable Diffusion 2.1 to generate high-quality GI images that enhance training databases without violating patient privacy. This research utilized the Kvasir-VQA dataset. Our Florence-2 VQA model achieved ROUGE-1 of 0.92, ROUGE-L of 0.91, and BLEU score improvements from 0.08 to 0.24. Fine-tuning on private datasets consistently showed better results than fine-tuning on public datasets. The rank-4 LoRA synthesis achieved optimal performance with a fidelity score of 0.290, an agreement score of 0.730, and a Frechet BiomedCLIP Distance (FBD) of 1450, reducing computational costs by almost 90 percent. This framework improves the clinical potential of AI in GI endoscopy. Compared to FLUX, MSDM, and Kandinsky 2.2, our model demonstrates superior FBD and strong semantic alignment. While other models lead in Fidelity or Agreement, our lower FBD indicates better image-text coherence. These results establish our approach as a robust solution for enhancing VQA and synthetic data generation in clinical AI.
GALAR-TemporalNet v2: Anatomy-Guided Dual-Branch Temporal Classification with Bidirectional Mamba and Dual-Graph GCN for Video Capsule Endoscopy -- after competition results
Video Capsule Endoscopy (VCE) poses a challenging multi-label temporal classification problem, requiring simultaneous localization of 8 anatomical regions and detection of 9 pathological findings across tens of thousands of frames. We present GALAR-TemporalNet v2, a hierarchical temporal model that addresses three core challenges: extreme class imbalance, long-range temporal dependencies, and pathology--anatomy entanglement. Our architecture combines windowed self-attention for local modeling, a Dual-Graph GCN for global frame relationships, and Bidirectional Mamba for selective boundary context encoding. A novel anatomy prototype residual pathway decouples pathological deviation signals from normal organ appearance, and a frame-level GCN skip connection stabilizes training of visually confusable rare classes. The competition version, GALAR-TemporalNet, achieved an overall [email protected] of 0.2644 and [email protected] of 0.2353 on the RARE-VISION test set. Following the competition, the redesigned GALAR-TemporalNet v2 -- incorporating a restructured pathology branch, refined loss functions, and extended post-processing -- improved these results to [email protected] of 0.3409 and [email protected] of 0.3333.
VISTA: Validation-Guided Integration of Spatial and Temporal Foundation Models with Anatomical Decoding for Rare-Pathology VCE Event Detection -- after competition results
Capsule endoscopy event detection is challenging because clinically relevant findings are sparse, visually heterogeneous, and evaluated at the event level rather than by frame accuracy. We propose VISTA, a metric-aligned multi-backbone framework for the RAREVISION task. VISTA combines EndoFM-LV for temporal context and DINOv3 ViTL/16 for frame-level visual semantics, followed by a Diverse Head Ensemble (DHE), Validation-Guided Weighted Fusion (VGWF), and Anatomy-Aware Temporal Event Decoding (ATED). The original official submission achieved hidden-test temporal [email protected] of 0.3530 and [email protected] of 0.3235. After the competition, extending local threshold refinement with a global coarse search improved performance to 0.3726 [email protected] and 0.3431 [email protected], ranking Team ACVLab second in the post-competition evaluation.
Understanding Model Behavior in Monocular Polyp Sizing
Accurate polyp size stratification guides surveillance decisions, with lesions larger than 5 mm typically requiring closer follow-up. However, monocular colonoscopy lacks a reliable metric reference. We present a diagnostic audit of binary polyp size classification (<=5 mm vs. >5 mm) across multiple public multi-center datasets, model families, and patient-stratified cross-validation. Across architectures and input modalities, including RGB appearance, relative depth, and photometry, model performance is moderately consistent, suggesting reliance on cues correlated with examination behavior rather than true metric scales. By providing ground-truth scale at varying granularities, we quantify the potential improvement from perfect scale information and show that current depth estimation and global calibration offer limited gains. We further demonstrate that segmentation errors under distribution shift eliminate most of this potential, with oracle scale under predicted masks recovering only baseline performance. These results highlight metric scale and mask robustness as two independent bottlenecks and provide reusable evaluation tools such as oracle scale ladders, shortcut partitions, and mask substitution for auditing future polyp sizing pipelines. Our code is publicly accessible at https://github.com/anaxqx/polyp-sizing-audit.
SCARED-C: Corrected Camera Poses for Endoscopic Depth Estimation
The SCARED dataset is a widely used benchmark for endoscopic depth estimation, offering ground-truth 3D reconstructions captured with a structured light sensor. However, the depth maps for non-keyframe images rely on robot kinematics that introduce substantial pose errors, limiting the reliably labeled portion of the dataset to 35 keyframes. We present SCARED-C, a corrected version of the SCARED dataset that expands the number of reliable RGB-D pairs from 35 to 17,135. Our pipeline applies COLMAP, a Structure-from-Motion system, to re-estimate camera poses for all frames, followed by a scale recovery step that aligns the resulting reconstructions to metric space using the ground-truth keyframe depth maps. We validate the corrected poses through (1) stereo disparity evaluation and (2) monocular depth estimation experiments. The corrected dataset and code are publicly released to the community.
DepthPolyp: Pseudo-Depth Guided Lightweight Segmentation for Real-Time Colonoscopy
Accurate polyp segmentation in colonoscopy is essential for early colorectal cancer detection, yet real-world clinical environments pose persistent challenges such as motion blur, specular reflections, and illumination instability. Most existing methods are optimized on clean benchmark images and suffer noticeable performance degradation when deployed in authentic surgical scenarios. We propose DepthPolyp, a lightweight and robust segmentation framework based on pseudo-depth-guided multi-task learning and efficient feature modulation. The architecture combines hierarchical Ghost factorization for compact feature generation, Interleaved Shuffle Fusion for low-cost cross-scale interaction, and Dynamic Group Gating for adaptive group-wise feature weighting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DepthPolyp achieves strong cross-dataset generalization when trained on degraded data and evaluated on both clean and noisy target domains, consistently outperforming lightweight baselines and remaining competitive with substantially larger models. In real surgical video evaluation on PolypGen, DepthPolyp achieves better segmentation performance than models up to larger while preserving real-time inference speed. With only 3.57M parameters and 0.86 GMACs, the proposed method runs at over 180 FPS on mobile devices, making it well suited for real-time deployment in resource-constrained clinical environments. Code and pretrained weights are available at: https://github.com/ReaganWu/DepthPolyp/
Training-Time Optical Priors for Wireless Capsule Endoscopy Classification: Hemoglobin-Aware Input Fusion with Cross-Vendor Evaluation
Gastrointestinal cancers cause approximately 3.4 million deaths annually, and early small-bowel lesions are easily missed at wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE). RGB-trained WCE classifiers conflate hemoglobin contrast with bile staining and illumination falloff, limiting sensitivity to small-vessel vascular findings such as Lymphangiectasia. We introduce a physics-informed framework that injects an analytic, Monte-Carlo-inspired hemoglobin prior into a standard classifier purely at training time -- to our knowledge the first use of an explicit optical light-transport prior in WCE classification. On Kvasir-Capsule (47,238 frames, 43 patients, 11 evaluable classes; patient-disjoint split) we evaluate, across six seeds against an RGB-only EfficientNet-B0 baseline, a five-channel input-fusion variant feeding the prior alongside RGB, a distillation variant that runs on plain three-channel RGB at inference, and a three-stream extension adding a temporal Transformer and an autoencoder-residual stream; we replicate across ResNet-18 and ConvNeXt-Tiny and assess cross-vendor zero-shot transfer on the public Galar cohort. Input fusion lifts cross-seed macro-AUC from 0.760 to 0.783 (5/6 seeds positive); distillation reaches 0.773; the three-stream model reaches 0.804 (+0.044 over baseline, paired DeLong p < 0.0001). Lymphangiectasia AUC rises from 0.238 to 0.337, sign-consistent across all six seeds. A four-variant ablation reveals a parameterization-mechanism boundary: only the spatial-channel form lifts. Cross-vendor zero-shot on Galar retains about 60% of the lift. The distillation variant deploys on plain RGB with a free interpretability heatmap, and we release GalKva-2026, a paired cross-vendor benchmark.
CoGE: Sim-to-Real Online Geometric Estimation for Monocular Colonoscopy
Geometric estimation including depth estimation and scene reconstruction is a crucial technique for colonoscopy which can provide surgeons with 3D spatial perception and navigation. However, geometric ground truth in colonoscopy is difficult to obtain due to narrow and enclosed space of the colon, while there is a large feature gap between simulated data and realistic data caused by artifacts and illumination. In this paper, we present CoGE, a novel framework for online monocular geometric estimation during colonoscopy. Firstly, we propose an illumination-aware supervision module based on the Retinex theory to address illumination diversity in different colonoscopy scenes. Moreover, a structure-aware perception module is proposed based on wavelet decomposition to extract common structural and local features of the colon. Both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that the proposed model solely trained on simulated data achieves state-of-the-art performance in geometric estimation for both simulated and realistic scenes.
Prediction of Rectal Cancer Regrowth from Longitudinal Endoscopy
Clinical trial studies indicate benefit of watch-and-wait (WW) surveillance for patients with rectal cancer showing a complete or near clinical response (CR) directly after treatment (restaging). However, there are no objectively accurate methods to early detect local tumor regrowth (LR) in patients undergoing WW from follow-up exams. Hence, we developed Temporal Rectal Endoscopy Cross-attention (TREX), a longitudinal deep learning approach that combines pairs of images acquired at restaging and follow-up to distinguish CR from LR. TREX uses pretrained Swin Transformers in a siamese setting to extract features from longitudinal images and dual cross-attention to combine the features without spatial co-registration between image pairs. TREX and Swin-based baselines were trained under two settings: (a) detecting LR or CR at the last available follow-up and (b) early detection of LR at 3--6, 6--12, and 12--24 months before clinical confirmation. TREX achieved the highest accuracy in detecting LR with a high sensitivity of 97% 6% and a balanced accuracy of 90% 3%, and outperformed all baselines in early detection at both 3--6 (74% 1%) and 6--12 months (62% 4%) prior to clinical detection. Clinical validation via a surgeon survey showed that TREX matched attending-level overall accuracy (TREX: 86.21% vs.\ Clinicians: 87.84% 1.28%). Finally, we explored TREX's ability to predict treatment response by combining pre-treatment (pre-TNT) and restaging endoscopies, achieving a balanced accuracy of 73% 12%. These results show that longitudinal deep learning analysis of endoscopy may improve surveillance and enable earlier identification of rectal cancer regrowth.
Contrastive Learning under Noisy Temporal Self-Supervision for Colonoscopy Videos
Learning robust representations of polyp tracklets is key to enabling multiple AI-assisted colonoscopy applications, from polyp characterization to automated reporting and retrieval. Supervised contrastive learning is an effective approach for learning such representations, but it typically relies on correct positive and negative definitions. Collecting these labels requires linking tracklets that depict the same underlying polyp entity throughout the video, which is costly and demands specialized clinical expertise. In this work, we leverage the sequential workflow of colonoscopy procedures to derive self-supervised associations from temporal structure. Since temporally derived associations are not guaranteed to be correct, we introduce a noise-aware contrastive loss to account for noisy associations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the learned representations across multiple downstream tasks, including polyp retrieval and re-identification, size estimation, and histology classification. Our method outperforms prior self-supervised and supervised baselines, and matches or exceeds recent foundation models across all tasks, using a lightweight encoder trained on only 27 videos. Code is available at https://github.com/lparolari/ntssl.
CapCLIP: A Vision-Language Representation Alignment Approach for Wireless Capsule Endoscopy Analysis
Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) enables non-invasive visual assessment of the small bowel, but its clinical utility is constrained by the large volume of frames generated per examination and the difficulty of recognising subtle abnormalities under highly variable imaging conditions. Existing learning-based approaches for WCE are predominantly vision-only, often confined to narrow pathology sets, and show limited transfer across datasets and centres. To address these limitations, this study introduces CapCLIP, a domain-specific vision-language representation learning framework for WCE. CapCLIP aligns capsule endoscopy frames with clinically grounded textual descriptions derived from standardised nomenclature and pathology-aware caption templates, thereby learning embeddings that are both semantically informed and transferable. The proposed framework is evaluated against relevant open-source vision and vision-language foundation models under strict zero-shot conditions using unseen WCE datasets. Evaluation covers three downstream tasks: K-nearest neighbour classification, CLIP-style image-text classification, and text-to-image retrieval. Across these settings, CapCLIP consistently outperforms the compared baselines, with particularly strong gains in zero-shot image-text classification and cross-modal retrieval on out-of-distribution datasets. The results indicate that language-guided representation learning can improve both generalisation and semantic interpretability in WCE analysis. These findings position CapCLIP as a step toward foundation models tailored to capsule endoscopy and support the use of language-grounded WCE analysis.
Anatomical Landmark-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Gastric Navigation
Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) enables painless visualization of the gastrointestinal tract, but its diagnostic potential is limited by incomplete mucosal coverage and poor transferability of existing navigation methods across patient anatomies. We propose a transferable, anatomical landmarkguided deep reinforcement learning (AL-DRL) framework for autonomous gastric navigation. Leveraging a lightweight edgecontour-depth fusion module, our policy operates on stable, lowdimensional landmark coordinates rather than high-dimensional video streams, effectively bridging the sim-to-real gap. In simulations across eight patient-derived models, the method achieves over 97% coverage within 50 seconds, significantly outperforming vanilla PPO, SAC, and DQN agents. A two-stage sim-to-real pipeline with an adaptive dynamic programming controller actively mitigates physical disturbances. Ex-vivo experiments demonstrate a mean coverage of 87% and a 53% reduction in procedure time compared with expert manual control.
Disentangled Anatomy-Disease Diffusion (DADD) for Controllable Ulcerative Colitis Progression Synthesis
Synthesizing longitudinal medical images at controllable disease stages while preserving patient-specific anatomy is hindered by the entanglement of pathological textures and structural features. We address this challenge for ulcerative colitis (UC) endoscopy, where severity follows a continuous ordinal progression along the Mayo Endoscopic Score (MES). Our framework, Disentangled Anatomy-Disease Diffusion (DADD), conditions a latent diffusion model on two complementary embeddings: a pretrained image encoder for patient anatomy and a separately trained ordinal embedder for cumulative disease severity. Since image embeddings inevitably capture disease information, we introduce a Feature Purifier, a cross-attention-based erasure mechanism that identifies and suppresses disease-correlated channels, yielding purified anatomical representations. These cleaned anatomy tokens and target disease tokens are injected into the denoising network via a Triple-Pathway Cross-Attention mechanism with resolution-dependent routing gates. This architecture leverages the U-Net hierarchy, in which different network depths encode global structure versus fine-grained pathological texture. Furthermore, we introduce Delta Steering, a training-free directional signal derived from the ordinal embeddings that enables explicit, single-pass control over disease transitions at inference without requiring additional forward passes. Validated on the LIMUC dataset, our approach produces high-fidelity images across all severity levels and effectively rebalances skewed class distributions, enhancing performance for downstream classification tasks. The dataset is available at zenodo.org/records/5827695 and the code base at github.com/umutdundar99/progressive-stable-diffusion
Multi-frame Restoration for High-rate Lissajous Confocal Laser Endomicroscopy
Lissajous confocal laser endomicroscopy (CLE) is a promising solution for high speed in vivo optical biopsy for handheld scenarios. However, Lissajous scanning traces a resonant trajectory and samples only the visited pixels per frame; at high frame rates, many pixels remain unvisited, creating structured holes. In this work, we introduce the first benchmark for high-rate Lissajous CLE, consisting of low-quality video clips paired with high-quality reference images. The reference images are wide-FOV mosaics obtained by stitching stabilized, slow-scan frames of the same tissue, enabling temporally aligned supervision. Using this dataset, we propose MIRA, a lightweight recurrent framework for Lissajous CLE restoration that iteratively aggregates temporal context through feature reuse and displacement alignment. Our experiments demonstrate that MIRA outperforms both lightweight and high-complexity baselines in restoration quality while maintaining a favorable computational efficiency suitable for clinical deployment.
Stop Holding Your Breath: CT-Informed Gaussian Splatting for Dynamic Bronchoscopy
Bronchoscopic navigation relies on registering endoscopic video to a preoperative CT scan, but respiratory motion deforms the airway by 5-20 mm, creating CT-to-body divergence that limits localization accuracy. In practice, this is mitigated through breath-hold protocols, which attempt to match the intraoperative anatomy to a static CT, but are difficult to reproduce and disrupt clinical workflow. We propose to eliminate the need for breath-hold protocols by leveraging patient-specific respiratory modeling. Paired inhale-exhale CT scans, already acquired for planning, implicitly define the patient-specific deformation space of the breathing airway. By registering these scans, we reduce respiratory motion to a single scalar breathing phase per frame, constraining all reconstructions to anatomically observed configurations. We embed this representation within a mesh-anchored Gaussian splatting framework, where a lightweight estimator infers breathing phase directly from endoscopic RGB, enabling continuous, deformation-aware reconstruction throughout the respiratory cycle without breath-holds or external sensing. To enable quantitative evaluation, we introduce RESPIRE, a physically grounded bronchoscopy simulation pipeline with per-frame ground truth for geometry, pose, breathing phase, and deformation. Experiments on RESPIRE show that our approach achieves geometrically faithful reconstruction, over 20x faster training, and 1.22 mm target localization accuracy (within the 3mm clinically relevant tolerances) outperforming unconstrained single-CT baselines. Please check out our website for additional visuals: https://asdunnbe.github.io/RESPIRE/
DepthPilot: From Controllability to Interpretability in Colonoscopy Video Generation
Controllable medical video generation has achieved remarkable progress, but it still lacks interpretability, which requires the alignment of generated contents with physical priors and faithful clinical manifestations. To push the boundaries from mere controllability to interpretability, we propose DepthPilot, the first interpretable framework for colonoscopy video generation. This work takes a step toward trustworthy generation through two synergistic paradigms. To achieve explicit geometric grounding, DepthPilot devises a prior distribution alignment strategy, injecting depth constraints into the diffusion backbone via parameter-efficient fine-tuning to ensure anatomical fidelity. To enhance intrinsic nonlinear modeling under these geometric constraints, DepthPilot employs an adaptive spline denoising module, replacing fixed linear weights with learnable spline functions to capture complex spatio-temporal dynamics. Extensive evaluations across three public datasets and in-house clinical data confirm DepthPilot's robust ability to produce physically consistent videos. It achieves FID scores below 15 across all benchmarks and ranks first in clinician assessments, bridging the gap between "visually realistic" and "clinically interpretable". Moreover, DepthPilot-generated videos are expected to enable reliable 3D reconstruction, facilitating surgical navigation and blind region identification, and serve as a foundation toward the colorectal world model.
Image Compression with Bubble-Aware Frame Rate Adaptation for Energy-Efficient Video Capsule Endoscopy
Video Capsule Endoscopy (VCE) is a promising method for improving the medical examination of the small intestine in the gastrointestinal tract. A key challenge is their limited size, resulting in a short battery lifetime which conflicts with high energy consumption for image capturing and transmission to an on-body device. Thus, we propose an image compression pipeline that substantially reduces the transmitted data while preserving diagnostic image quality. Furthermore, we exploit characteristics of the compression process to identify frames with low diagnostic value mainly caused by bubbles, without requiring additional image analysis. For low-visibility frames, a dynamic bubble-aware frame rate adaptation strategy reduces image acquisition and transmission during these phases while preserving sensitivity to potential anomalies. The proposed compression and frame rate adaptation are evaluated on a RISC-V platform using the Kvasir-Capsule and Galar datasets. The compression method achieves a compression ratio of 5.748 (82.6%) at a peak signal-to-noise ratio of 40.3 dB, indicating negligible loss of visual quality. The compression accomplished a mean energy reduction of the whole system by 20.58%. Additionally, the proposed bubble-aware frame rate adaptation reduced the energy consumption by up to 40%. These results demonstrate the potential of our method to increase the applicability of VCE.
Sum-of-Checks: Structured Reasoning for Surgical Safety with Large Vision-Language Models
Purpose: Accurate assessment of the Critical View of Safety (CVS) during laparoscopic cholecystectomy is essential to prevent bile duct injury, a complication associated with significant morbidity and mortality. While large vision-language models (LVLMs) offer flexible reasoning, their predictions remain difficult to audit and unreliable on safety-critical surgical tasks. Methods: We introduce Sum-of-Checks, a framework that decomposes each CVS criterion into expert-defined reasoning checks reflecting clinically relevant visual evidence. Given a laparoscopic frame, an LVLM evaluates each check, producing a binary judgment and justification. Criterion-level scores are computed via fixed, weighted aggregation of check outcomes. We evaluate on the Endoscapes2023 benchmark using three frontier LVLMs, comparing against direct prompting, chain-of-thought, and sub-question decomposition, each with and without few-shot examples. Results: Sum-of-Checks improves average frame-level mean average precision by 12--14% relative to the best baseline across all three models and criteria. Analysis of individual checks reveals that LVLMs are reliable on observational checks (e.g., visibility, tool obstruction) but show substantial variability on decision-critical anatomical evidence. Conclusion: Structuring surgical reasoning into expert-aligned verification checks improves both accuracy and transparency of LVLM-based CVS assessment, demonstrating that explicitly separating evidence elicitation from decision-making is critical for reliable and auditable surgical AI systems. Code is available at https://github.com/BrachioLab/SumOfChecks.
Divide-then-Diagnose: Weaving Clinician-Inspired Contexts for Ultra-Long Capsule Endoscopy Videos
Capsule endoscopy (CE) enables non-invasive gastrointestinal screening, but current CE research remains largely limited to frame-level classification and detection, leaving video-level analysis underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce and formally define a new task, diagnosis-driven CE video summarization, which requires extracting key evidence frames that covers clinically meaningful findings and making accurate diagnoses from those evidence frames. This setting is challenging because diagnostically relevant events are extremely sparse and can be overwhelmed by tens of thousands of redundant normal frames, while individual observations are often ambiguous due to motion blur, debris, specular highlights, and rapid viewpoint changes. To facilitate research in this direction, we introduce VideoCAP, the first CE dataset with diagnosis-driven annotations derived from real clinical reports. VideoCAP comprises 240 full-length videos and provides realistic supervision for both key evidence frame extraction and diagnosis. To address this task, we further propose DiCE, a clinician-inspired framework that mirrors the standard CE reading workflow. DiCE first performs efficient candidate screening over the raw video, then uses a Context Weaver to organize candidates into coherent diagnostic contexts that preserve distinct lesion events, and an Evidence Converger to aggregate multi-frame evidence within each context into robust clip-level judgments. Experiments show that DiCE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, producing concise and clinically reliable diagnostic summaries. These results highlight diagnosis-driven contextual reasoning as a promising paradigm for ultra-long CE video summarization.
Clinical Cognition Alignment for Gastrointestinal Diagnosis with Multimodal LLMs
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in medical image analysis. However, their application in gastrointestinal endoscopy is currently hindered by two critical limitations: the misalignment between general model reasoning and standardized clinical cognitive pathways, and the lack of causal association between visual features and diagnostic outcomes. In this paper, we propose a novel Clinical-Cognitive-Aligned (CogAlign) framework to address these challenges. First, we endow the model with rigorous clinical analytical capabilities by constructing the hierarchical clinical cognition dataset and employing Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Unlike conventional approaches, this strategy internalizes the hierarchical diagnostic logic of experts, ranging from anatomical localization and morphological evaluation to microvascular analysis, directly into the model. Second, to eliminate visual bias, we provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that standard supervised tuning inevitably converges to spurious background correlations. Guided by this insight, we propose a counterfactual-driven reinforcement learning strategy to enforce causal rectification. By generating counterfactual normal samples via lesion masking and optimizing through clinical-cognition-centric rewards, we constrain the model to strictly ground its diagnosis in causal lesion features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves State-of-the-Art (SoTA) performance across multiple benchmarks, significantly enhancing diagnostic accuracy in complex clinical scenarios.
Reliable Mislabel Detection for Video Capsule Endoscopy Data
The classification performance of deep neural networks relies strongly on access to large, accurately annotated datasets. In medical imaging, however, obtaining such datasets is particularly challenging since annotations must be provided by specialized physicians, which severely limits the pool of annotators. Furthermore, class boundaries can often be ambiguous or difficult to define which further complicates machine learning-based classification. In this paper, we want to address this problem and introduce a framework for mislabel detection in medical datasets. This is validated on the two largest, publicly available datasets for Video Capsule Endoscopy, an important imaging procedure for examining the gastrointestinal tract based on a video stream of lowresolution images. In addition, potentially mislabeled samples identified by our pipeline were reviewed and re-annotated by three experienced gastroenterologists. Our results show that the proposed framework successfully detects incorrectly labeled data and results in an improved anomaly detection performance after cleaning the datasets compared to current baselines.
EndoCogniAgent: Closed-Loop Agentic Reasoning with Self-Consistency Validation for Endoscopic Diagnosis
Endoscopic diagnosis is an iterative process in which clinicians acquire, compare, and verify local visual evidence before reaching a conclusion. Current AI systems do not adequately support this process because fine-grained evidence acquisition and multi-step reasoning remain weakly coupled, complicating reconciliation of image-derived findings with their textual interpretations. This gives rise to two failure modes, hallucinated evidence and uncorrected error accumulation, that undermine diagnostic reliability. We propose EndoCogniAgent, a closed-loop agentic framework that formulates endoscopic diagnosis as a controlled state update process for integrating complementary visual and textual evidence. At each reasoning round, a central planner selects an evidence acquisition action, specialized expert tools extract spatial and semantic observations as structured textual evidence, and a self-consistency validation mechanism examines this evidence along two dimensions, knowledge consistency against the input image and temporal consistency with prior validated findings, before updating the diagnostic state. Validated observations are admitted into the evolving state to condition subsequent planning, while insufficiently supported or conflicting findings are retained with corrective feedback that redirects the planner toward additional verification. We further introduce EndoAgentBench, a workflow-oriented benchmark comprising 6,132 question-answer pairs from 11 endoscopic datasets, to evaluate diagnostic agents across a comprehensive diagnostic chain, from fine-grained visual perception to high-level diagnostic reasoning. EndoCogniAgent achieves 85.23% overall accuracy on perception tasks and 71.13% clinical acceptance rate on reasoning tasks. Blinded clinician evaluation further shows consistent improvements in diagnostic response quality over the evaluated baselines.
Online camera-pose-free stereo endoscopic tissue deformation recovery with tissue-invariant vision-biomechanics consistency
Tissue deformation recovery based on stereo endoscopic images is crucial for tool-tissue interaction analysis and benefits surgical navigation and autonomous soft tissue manipulation. Previous research suffers from the problems raised from camera motion, occlusion, large tissue deformation, lack of tissue-specific biomechanical priors, and reliance on offline processing. Unlike previous studies where the tissue geometry and deformation are represented by 3D points and displacements, the proposed method models tissue geometry as the 3D point and derivative map and tissue deformation as the 3D displacement and local deformation map. For a single surface point, 6 parameters are used to describe its rigid motion and 3 parameters for its local deformation. The method is formulated under the camera-centric setting, where all motions are regarded as the scene motion with respect to the camera. Inter-frame alignment is realized by optimizing the inter-frame deformation, making it unnecessary to estimate camera pose. The concept of the canonical map is introduced to optimize tissue geometry and deformation in an online approach. Quantitative and qualitative experiments were conducted using in vivo and ex vivo laparoscopic datasets. With the inputs of depth and optical flow, the method stably models tissue geometry and deformation even when the tissue is partially occluded or moving outside the field of view. Results show that the 3D reconstruction accuracy in the non-occluded and occluded areas reaches 0.370.27 mm and 0.390.21 mm in terms of surface distance, respectively. The method can also estimate surface strain distribution during various manipulations as an extra modality for mechanical-based analysis.
SegCol Challenge: Semantic Segmentation for Tools and Fold Edges in Colonoscopy data
Improving the reliability and completeness of colonoscopic inspection is critical for reducing missed lesions and improving colorectal cancer prevention. Reliable scene understanding is essential for navigation, reconstruction, and assessment of inspection completeness. Anatomical structures such as mucosal folds provide stable geometric cues for endoscope localization, while surgical instruments introduce dynamic occlusions that complicate visual interpretation. However, existing gastrointestinal endoscopy datasets largely focus on disease detection or artifact segmentation, leaving a gap in precise annotations of structural landmarks and instruments. We introduce SegCol, a dataset and benchmark for semantic segmentation of colon fold edges and surgical instruments derived from the EndoMapper dataset. SegCol provides manually annotated pixel-level masks for three instrument classes and thin fold-edge structures across temporally consistent image sequences. It forms the basis of the SegCol Challenge, organized as part of the EndoVis Challenge at MICCAI 2024, evaluating both supervised segmentation and annotation-efficient active learning. We further study segmentation metrics, including Dice, ODS/OIS, AP, and CLDice, under structural perturbations and different object geometries, and analyze participating methods, architectural choices, and active learning strategies. Our findings show that metric behavior strongly depends on target structure, highlighting the need for carefully selected evaluation protocols in endoscopic segmentation. Details are available at https://www.synapse.org/Synapse:syn54124209/wiki/626563, and code at https://github.com/surgical-vision/segcol_challenge.
Precise localization within the GI tract by combining classification of CNNs and time-series analysis of HMMs
This paper presents a method to efficiently classify the gastroenterologic section of images derived from Video Capsule Endoscopy (VCE) studies by exploring the combination of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for classification with the time-series analysis properties of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). It is demonstrated that successive time-series analysis identifies and corrects errors in the CNN output. Our approach achieves an accuracy of on the Rhode Island (RI) Gastroenterology dataset. This allows for precise localization within the gastrointestinal (GI) tract while requiring only approximately 1M parameters and thus, provides a method suitable for low power devices