Hongliang Ren

Liangjing Shao, Beilei Cui, Yiming Huang et al.

Depth estimation is a significant task for 3D perception in endoscopic surgeries. However, illumination interference and feature diversity in various endoscopic scenes are still challenges for generalizable depth estimation and ego-motion estimation. Based on this, a novel self-supervised framework, EndoMINI, is proposed for depth estimation in endoscopic scenes. Specifically, mixture of low-rank experts (MiLoRE) is proposed to perform parameter-efficient fine-tuning, which can also boost the model adaptation to scenes with different characteristics. Meanwhile, an intrinsic image alignment (IIA) is introduced into the training loss to alleviate the influence of light reflectance in endoscopy with a novel intrinsic image decomposition network. The proposed method is evaluated on SCARED datasets for supervised depth estimation, and two endoscopic datasets, Hamlyn and SERV-CT, for zero-shot depth estimation, compared with state-of-the-art works as well. The experimental results demonstrate outstanding performance of the proposed model and the effects of the main contributions.

Jinsong Lin, Zikang Pan, Wanhao Liu et al.

Autonomous endoscopic navigation can reduce clinicians' operational burden, yet robust control remains challenging due to tissue deformation, transient occlusions, and rapidly changing viewpoints. Existing learning-based policies typically predict actions from current observations without explicitly modeling future dynamics, limiting their robustness and reliability in safety-critical settings. World Action Models (WAMs) offer a promising alternative by coupling predictive visual dynamics with action generation, but extending them to robotic endoscopy remains challenging due to limited training data, restricted viewpoint diversity, deformable anatomy, and high inference latency. We present EndoWAM, which is, to our knowledge, the first WAM for generalizable robotic endoscopic navigation. EndoWAM introduces future grounding, which predicts task-relevant target regions in future observations from intermediate denoising features of a video world model. Specifically, EndoWAM couples a lightweight diffusion transformer for future target-region prediction with a discrete action expert through a shared predictive representation. This design injects target-aware supervision into predictive dynamics modeling, improving robustness to visual degradation and viewpoint changes while enabling real-time control in a single denoising pass. We further introduce EndoMotion, a robotic endoscopic motion dataset spanning three anatomically distinct procedures: ureteroscopy, esophagoscopy, and endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP). EndoWAM consistently outperforms all baselines and alternative grounding strategies, while demonstrating strong zero-shot generalization to unseen viewpoints, environments, and targets. These results establish EndoWAM as a predictive, target-grounded framework for accurate, generalizable, and long-horizon navigation in visually constrained endoscopic environments.