HieraSurg: Hierarchy-Aware Diffusion Model for Surgical Video Generation
This addresses the need for factual simulation in surgical training and planning, though it is incremental as it builds on existing diffusion models for video generation.
The paper tackled the problem of generating surgical videos that maintain consistency with surgical actions and phases, proposing HieraSurg, a hierarchy-aware diffusion model that outperformed prior work on Cholecystectomy Surgical Video Generation, showing strong generalization and higher frame-rate capabilities.
Surgical Video Synthesis has emerged as a promising research direction following the success of diffusion models in general-domain video generation. Although existing approaches achieve high-quality video generation, most are unconditional and fail to maintain consistency with surgical actions and phases, lacking the surgical understanding and fine-grained guidance necessary for factual simulation. We address these challenges by proposing HieraSurg, a hierarchy-aware surgical video generation framework consisting of two specialized diffusion models. Given a surgical phase and an initial frame, HieraSurg first predicts future coarse-grained semantic changes through a segmentation prediction model. The final video is then generated by a second-stage model that augments these temporal segmentation maps with fine-grained visual features, leading to effective texture rendering and integration of semantic information in the video space. Our approach leverages surgical information at multiple levels of abstraction, including surgical phase, action triplets, and panoptic segmentation maps. The experimental results on Cholecystectomy Surgical Video Generation demonstrate that the model significantly outperforms prior work both quantitatively and qualitatively, showing strong generalization capabilities and the ability to generate higher frame-rate videos. The model exhibits particularly fine-grained adherence when provided with existing segmentation maps, suggesting its potential for practical surgical applications.