EndoGSim: Physics-Aware 4D Dynamic Endoscopic Scene Simulations via MLLM-Guided Gaussian Splatting
This work addresses the need for realistic, physically accurate simulation in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery, which is critical for downstream tasks like surgical planning and training.
EndoGSim introduces a physics-aware framework for dynamic endoscopic scene reconstruction and simulation, using MLLM-guided 4D Gaussian Splatting and differentiable Material Point Method, achieving superior simulation fidelity and physical accuracy over state-of-the-art methods on open-source and in-house datasets.
In robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery, high-fidelity dynamic endoscopic scene reconstruction and simulation are crucial to enhancing downstream tasks and advancing surgical outcomes. However, existing methods primarily focus on visual reconstruction, lacking physics-based descriptions of the scene required for realistic simulation. We propose a unified framework that achieves physics-aware reconstruction and physical simulation of endoscopic scenes through Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs)-guided Gaussian Splatting. Our approach utilizes 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) integrated with pre-trained segmentation and depth estimation to represent deformable tissues and tools. To achieve automatic inference of physical properties, we introduce an object-wise material field that initializes material parameters via MLLM and refines them through a differentiable Material Point Method (MPM) under joint supervision from rendered images and optical flow. Validated on both open-source and in-house datasets, our framework achieves superior simulation fidelity and physical accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods, underscoring its potential to advance robot-assisted surgical applications.