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Jialun Pei

Publications and source records attributed to Jialun Pei.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Optimize Surgical Triplet Recognition: A Knowledge-Driven Mixture-of-Experts Solution

Surgical action triplet recognition constitutes a critical task in context-aware robot-assisted surgery, facilitating automatic surgical action perception by identifying instrument, verb, target, and their association. However, existing works struggle to analyze such complex surgical scenes due to three main issues: (1) component-level optimization conflicts caused by entangled feature spaces, (2) category-level optimization conflicts arising from severe data imbalance, and (3) lack of domain knowledge guidance that limits model interpretability and robustness. To address these challenges, we propose a Mixture-of-Experts-guided Co-Optimization (\textit{MoeCo}) framework powered by knowledge-driven learning. Within the co-optimization pipeline, to first mitigate component-level conflicts, we introduce a component-tailored adapter that disentangles task-specific features across spatial-temporal regimes, facilitating effective component specialization. Next, we develop a coordinated gradient learning strategy to handle category-level conflicts, which adaptively rebalances positive-negative gradients to enhance the perception of rare categories. Notably, inspired by surgical domain expertise, we introduce a knowledge-driven mixture-of-experts mechanism that dynamically integrates multimodal large language model-guided knowledge via activated experts, thereby enriching the co-optimization pipeline with more expressive and robust representations. Extensive experiments on the public CholecT45 and CholecT50 datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed co-optimization pipeline and the superiority of dynamic priors integration via the knowledge-driven mixture-of-experts mechanism.

cs.CV

LiverPlan: A Stage-Adaptive Immersive Visual Analytics Framework for Anatomical Liver Surgical Planning

Anatomical liver resection (ALR) surgery is the most important treatment for liver cancer, yet preoperative planning demands complex, multi-stage clinical reasoning under competing safety constraints. Current 2D desktop tools are not well equipped to support this process, exhibiting three fundamental limitations: reliance on monolithic interfaces that fail to adapt to the distinct cognitive demands of each planning stage; a perceptual bottleneck caused by limited anatomical spatial representation and missing plane-vessel intersection visualization; and an attention bottleneck stemming from fragmented critical safety criteria display across separate views. We present LiverPlan, a stage-adaptive immersive visual analytics framework for ALR planning, grounded in an 8-month collaboration with two expert hepatobiliary surgeons. Decomposing the surgical planning process into three sequential yet cognitively distinct stages, LiverPlan externalizes the cognitive demand of each stage via tailored techniques: (1) context-preserving focus and hue-preserving rendering for anatomical discovery; (2) direct 3D resection plane manipulation coupled with real-time, embedded visual feedback on critical safety criteria during plan refinement; and (3) explicit plane-vessel intersection visualization for anticipatory surgery preparation. A within-subjects study with eight hepatobiliary surgeons against a desktop baseline shows large-effect-size improvements in task completion time, perceived cognitive workload, and system usability on controlled planning tasks. Moreover, our study reveals broader insights: LiverPlan reduces cognitive burden and encourages a shift in surgeons from merely satisfying safety criteria to actively optimizing them, suggesting that explicit visualization of spatial relationships lowers the cognitive barrier to complex surgical planning.

cs.HC

Attenuation-Resilient Alternating Optimization for Laparoscopic Liver Landmark Detection

Liver surface landmark detection is a fundamental prerequisite for anatomical guidance in laparoscopic liver surgery. However, it remains unreliable in practice due to two pervasive challenges: illumination attenuation in underexposed regions and the structural mismatch between pixel-wise localization and continuous curvilinear geometry. To address these limitations, we propose A2ONet, an attenuation-resilient alternating optimization network for robust liver landmark detection. To mitigate illumination attenuation, A2ONet embraces an illumination field compensation (IFC) block that adaptively enhances dark regions while preserving structural consistency. Meanwhile, we introduce a lightweight frequency-orientation selective filter (FOSF) to suppress repetitive texture interference and preserve salient curvilinear cues. Building upon these resilient representations, we design an alternating seg-curve optimization (ASCO) decoder that iteratively couples dense segmentation with explicit curve modeling, enabling mutual guidance to optimize both structural continuity and endpoint localization. Extensive evaluations on L3D-2K, L3D, and P2ILF demonstrate consistent improvements over competitive methods, establishing a more reliable foundation for intraoperative anatomy guidance. Our code will be available at https://github.com/hyperiondk115/A2ONet.

cs.CV

SurgLQA: Scalable Long-Horizon Surgical Video Question Answering

Surgical Video Question Answering (VideoQA) provides a promising paradigm for dynamic intraoperative interpretation, enabling real-time decision support and context-aware retrieval in clinical environments. Nevertheless, existing approaches are predominantly restricted to images or short clips, limiting their ability to model long-range procedural dynamics and causal dependencies across extended surgical workflows. To address this challenge, we propose SurgLQA, a unified long-horizon VideoQA framework for scalable surgical reasoning. This framework incorporates Faithful Temporal Consolidation (FTC), which leverages intrinsic temporal cues to construct compact long-range representations while preserving fine-grained temporal fidelity. Further, we develop Temporally-Grounded Multi-Policy Scaling (TMS), an adaptive test-time inference paradigm that strategically adjusts policy-level reasoning capacity within temporally grounded contexts. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we restructured a long-duration colonoscopy VideoQA benchmark, Colon-LQA, and conducted extensive experiments on Colon-LQA and REAL-Colon-VQA. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves consistent performance gains in long-range reasoning with temporally grounded inference. Code link: https://github.com/RascalGdd/SurgLQA.

cs.CV

Synergistic Bleeding Region and Point Detection in Laparoscopic Surgical Videos

Intraoperative bleeding in laparoscopic surgery causes rapid obscuration of the operative field to hinder the surgical process and increases the risk of postoperative complications. Intelligent detection of bleeding areas can quantify the blood loss to assist decision-making, while locating bleeding points helps surgeons quickly identify the source of bleeding and achieve hemostasis in time to improve surgical success rates. To fill the benchmark gap, we first construct a real-world laparoscopic surgical bleeding detection dataset, named SurgBlood, comprising 5,330 frames from 95 surgical video clips with bleeding region and point annotations. Accordingly, we develop a dual-task synergistic online detector called BlooDet, enabling simultaneous detection of bleeding regions and points in laparoscopic surgery. The baseline embraces a dual-branch bidirectional guid- ance design based on Segment Anything Model 2. The mask branch detects bleeding regions through adaptive edge and point prompt embeddings, while the point branch leverages mask memory to induce bleeding point memory modeling and captures point motion direction via inter-frame optical flow. By coupled bidirectional guidance, our framework explores spatial-temporal correlations while exploiting memory modeling to infer current bleeding status. Extensive experiments indicate that our method outperforms 13 counterparts in bleeding detection.

cs.CV

Benchmarking Endoscopic Surgical Image Restoration and Beyond

In endoscopic surgery, a clear and high-quality visual field is critical for surgeons to make accurate intraoperative decisions. However, persistent visual degradation, including smoke generated by energy devices, lens fogging from thermal gradients, and lens contamination due to blood or tissue fluid splashes during surgical procedures, severely impairs visual clarity. These degenerations can seriously hinder surgical workflow and pose risks to patient safety. To systematically investigate and address various forms of surgical scene degradation, we introduce a real- world open-source surgical image restoration dataset covering endoscopic environments, called SurgClean, which involves multi-type image restoration tasks from two medical sites, i.e., desmoking, defogging, and desplashing. SurgClean comprises 3,113 images with diverse degradation types and corresponding paired reference labels. Based on SurgClean, we establish a standardized evaluation benchmark and provide performance for 22 representative generic task-specific image restoration approaches, including 12 generic and 10 task-specific image restoration approaches. Experimental results reveal substantial performance gaps relative to clinical requirements, highlighting a critical opportunity for algorithm advancements in intelligent surgical restoration. Furthermore, we explore the degradation discrepancies between surgical and natural scenes from structural perception and semantic under- standing perspectives, providing fundamental insights for domain-specific image restoration research. Our work aims to empower restoration algorithms and improve the efficiency of clinical procedures.

cs.CV

Preoperative-to-intraoperative Liver Registration for Laparoscopic Surgery via Latent-Grounded Correspondence Constraints

In laparoscopic liver surgery, augmented reality technology enhances intraoperative anatomical guidance by overlaying 3D liver models from preoperative CT/MRI onto laparoscopic 2D views. However, existing registration methods lack explicit modeling of reliable 2D-3D geometric correspondences supported by latent evidence, leading to limited interpretability and potentially unstable alignment in clinical scenarios. In this work, we introduce Land-Reg, a correspondence-driven deformable registration framework that explicitly learns latent-grounded 2D-3D landmark correspondences as an interpretable intermediate representation to bridge cross-modal alignment. For rigid registration, Land-Reg embraces a Cross-modal Latent Alignment module to map multi-modal features into a unified latent space. Further, an Uncertainty-enhanced Overlap Landmark Detector with similarity matching is proposed to robustly estimate explicit 2D-3D landmark correspondences. For non-rigid registration, we design a novel shape-constrained supervision strategy that anchors shape deformation to matched landmarks through reprojection consistency and incorporates local-isometric regularization to alleviate inherent 2D-3D depth ambiguity, while a rendered-mask alignment enforces global shape consistency. Experimental results on the P2ILF dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method on both rigid pose estimation and non-rigid deformation. Our code will be available at https://github.com/cuiruize/Land-Reg.

cs.CV

U2-BENCH: Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models on Ultrasound Understanding

Ultrasound is a widely-used imaging modality critical to global healthcare, yet its interpretation remains challenging due to its varying image quality on operators, noises, and anatomical structures. Although large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive multimodal capabilities across natural and medical domains, their performance on ultrasound remains largely unexplored. We introduce U2-BENCH, the first comprehensive benchmark to evaluate LVLMs on ultrasound understanding across classification, detection, regression, and text generation tasks. U2-BENCH aggregates 7,241 cases spanning 15 anatomical regions and defines 8 clinically inspired tasks, such as diagnosis, view recognition, lesion localization, clinical value estimation, and report generation, across 50 ultrasound application scenarios. We evaluate 23 state-of-the-art LVLMs, both open- and closed-source, general-purpose and medical-specific. Our results reveal strong performance on image-level classification, but persistent challenges in spatial reasoning and clinical language generation. U2-BENCH establishes a rigorous and unified testbed to assess and accelerate LVLM research in the uniquely multimodal domain of medical ultrasound imaging.

cs.CV

MEJO: MLLM-Engaged Surgical Triplet Recognition via Inter- and Intra-Task Joint Optimization

Surgical triplet recognition, which involves identifying instrument, verb, target, and their combinations, is a complex surgical scene understanding challenge plagued by long-tailed data distribution. The mainstream multi-task learning paradigm benefiting from cross-task collaborative promotion has shown promising performance in identifying triples, but two key challenges remain: 1) inter-task optimization conflicts caused by entangling task-generic and task-specific representations; 2) intra-task optimization conflicts due to class-imbalanced training data. To overcome these difficulties, we propose the MLLM-Engaged Joint Optimization (MEJO) framework that empowers both inter- and intra-task optimization for surgical triplet recognition. For inter-task optimization, we introduce the Shared-Specific-Disentangled (S$^2$D) learning scheme that decomposes representations into task-shared and task-specific components. To enhance task-shared representations, we construct a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) powered probabilistic prompt pool to dynamically augment visual features with expert-level semantic cues. Additionally, comprehensive task-specific cues are modeled via distinct task prompts covering the temporal-spatial dimensions, effectively mitigating inter-task ambiguities. To tackle intra-task optimization conflicts, we develop a Coordinated Gradient Learning (CGL) strategy, which dissects and rebalances the positive-negative gradients originating from head and tail classes for more coordinated learning behaviors. Extensive experiments on the CholecT45 and CholecT50 datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework, validating its effectiveness in handling optimization conflicts.

cs.CV

Spatio-Temporal Representation Decoupling and Enhancement for Federated Instrument Segmentation in Surgical Videos

Surgical instrument segmentation under Federated Learning (FL) is a promising direction, which enables multiple surgical sites to collaboratively train the model without centralizing datasets. However, there exist very limited FL works in surgical data science, and FL methods for other modalities do not consider inherent characteristics in surgical domain: i) different scenarios show diverse anatomical backgrounds while highly similar instrument representation; ii) there exist surgical simulators which promote large-scale synthetic data generation with minimal efforts. In this paper, we propose a novel Personalized FL scheme, Spatio-Temporal Representation Decoupling and Enhancement (FedST), which wisely leverages surgical domain knowledge during both local-site and global-server training to boost segmentation. Concretely, our model embraces a Representation Separation and Cooperation (RSC) mechanism in local-site training, which decouples the query embedding layer to be trained privately, to encode respective backgrounds. Meanwhile, other parameters are optimized globally to capture the consistent representations of instruments, including the temporal layer to capture similar motion patterns. A textual-guided channel selection is further designed to highlight site-specific features, facilitating model adapta tion to each site. Moreover, in global-server training, we propose Synthesis-based Explicit Representation Quantification (SERQ), which defines an explicit representation target based on synthetic data to synchronize the model convergence during fusion for improving model generalization.

eess.IV

Rethinking Detecting Salient and Camouflaged Objects in Unconstrained Scenes

While the human visual system employs distinct mechanisms to perceive salient and camouflaged objects, existing models struggle to disentangle these tasks. Specifically, salient object detection (SOD) models frequently misclassify camouflaged objects as salient, while camouflaged object detection (COD) models conversely misinterpret salient objects as camouflaged. We hypothesize that this can be attributed to two factors: (i) the specific annotation paradigm of current SOD and COD datasets, and (ii) the lack of explicit attribute relationship modeling in current models. Prevalent SOD/COD datasets enforce a mutual exclusivity constraint, assuming scenes contain either salient or camouflaged objects, which poorly aligns with the real world. Furthermore, current SOD/COD methods are primarily designed for these highly constrained datasets and lack explicit modeling of the relationship between salient and camouflaged objects. In this paper, to promote the development of unconstrained salient and camouflaged object detection, we construct a large-scale dataset, USC12K, which features comprehensive labels and four different scenes that cover all possible logical existence scenarios of both salient and camouflaged objects. To explicitly model the relationship between salient and camouflaged objects, we propose a model called USCNet, which introduces two distinct prompt query mechanisms for modeling inter-sample and intra-sample attribute relationships. Additionally, to assess the model's ability to distinguish between salient and camouflaged objects, we design an evaluation metric called CSCS. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all scenes in various metrics. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/ssecv/USCNet.

cs.CV

Topology-Constrained Learning for Efficient Laparoscopic Liver Landmark Detection

Liver landmarks provide crucial anatomical guidance to the surgeon during laparoscopic liver surgery to minimize surgical risk. However, the tubular structural properties of landmarks and dynamic intraoperative deformations pose significant challenges for automatic landmark detection. In this study, we introduce TopoNet, a novel topology-constrained learning framework for laparoscopic liver landmark detection. Our framework adopts a snake-CNN dual-path encoder to simultaneously capture detailed RGB texture information and depth-informed topological structures. Meanwhile, we propose a boundary-aware topology fusion (BTF) module, which adaptively merges RGB-D features to enhance edge perception while preserving global topology. Additionally, a topological constraint loss function is embedded, which contains a center-line constraint loss and a topological persistence loss to ensure homotopy equivalence between predictions and labels. Extensive experiments on L3D and P2ILF datasets demonstrate that TopoNet achieves outstanding accuracy and computational complexity, highlighting the potential for clinical applications in laparoscopic liver surgery. Our code will be available at https://github.com/cuiruize/TopoNet.

cs.CV

Toward Reliable AR-Guided Surgical Navigation: Interactive Deformation Modeling with Data-Driven Biomechanics and Prompts

In augmented reality (AR)-guided surgical navigation, preoperative organ models are superimposed onto the patient's intraoperative anatomy to visualize critical structures such as vessels and tumors. Accurate deformation modeling is essential to maintain the reliability of AR overlays by ensuring alignment between preoperative models and the dynamically changing anatomy. Although the finite element method (FEM) offers physically plausible modeling, its high computational cost limits intraoperative applicability. Moreover, existing algorithms often fail to handle large anatomical changes, such as those induced by pneumoperitoneum or ligament dissection, leading to inaccurate anatomical correspondences and compromised AR guidance. To address these challenges, we propose a data-driven biomechanics algorithm that preserves FEM-level accuracy while improving computational efficiency. In addition, we introduce a novel human-in-the-loop mechanism into the deformation modeling process. This enables surgeons to interactively provide prompts to correct anatomical misalignments, thereby incorporating clinical expertise and allowing the model to adapt dynamically to complex surgical scenarios. Experiments on a publicly available dataset demonstrate that our algorithm achieves a mean target registration error of 3.42 mm. Incorporating surgeon prompts through the interactive framework further reduces the error to 2.78 mm, surpassing state-of-the-art methods in volumetric accuracy. These results highlight the ability of our framework to deliver efficient and accurate deformation modeling while enhancing surgeon-algorithm collaboration, paving the way for safer and more reliable computer-assisted surgeries.

cs.CV

Landmark-Free Preoperative-to-Intraoperative Registration in Laparoscopic Liver Resection

Liver registration by overlaying preoperative 3D models onto intraoperative 2D frames can assist surgeons in perceiving the spatial anatomy of the liver clearly for a higher surgical success rate. Existing registration methods rely heavily on anatomical landmark-based workflows, which encounter two major limitations: 1) ambiguous landmark definitions fail to provide efficient markers for registration; 2) insufficient integration of intraoperative liver visual information in shape deformation modeling. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a landmark-free preoperative-to-intraoperative registration framework utilizing effective self-supervised learning, termed \ourmodel. This framework transforms the conventional 3D-2D workflow into a 3D-3D registration pipeline, which is then decoupled into rigid and non-rigid registration subtasks. \ourmodel~first introduces a feature-disentangled transformer to learn robust correspondences for recovering rigid transformations. Further, a structure-regularized deformation network is designed to adjust the preoperative model to align with the intraoperative liver surface. This network captures structural correlations through geometry similarity modeling in a low-rank transformer network. To facilitate the validation of the registration performance, we also construct an in-vivo registration dataset containing liver resection videos of 21 patients, called \emph{P2I-LReg}, which contains 346 keyframes that provide a global view of the liver together with liver mask annotations and calibrated camera intrinsic parameters. Extensive experiments and user studies on both synthetic and in-vivo datasets demonstrate the superiority and potential clinical applicability of our method.

cs.CV

CvhSlicer 2.0: Immersive and Interactive Visualization of Chinese Visible Human Data in XR Environments

The study of human anatomy through advanced visualization techniques is crucial for medical research and education. In this work, we introduce CvhSlicer 2.0, an innovative XR system designed for immersive and interactive visualization of the Chinese Visible Human (CVH) dataset. Particularly, our proposed system operates entirely on a commercial XR headset, offering a range of visualization and interaction tools for dynamic 2D and 3D data exploration. By conducting comprehensive evaluations, our CvhSlicer 2.0 demonstrates strong capabilities in visualizing anatomical data, enhancing user engagement and improving educational effectiveness. A demo video is available at https://youtu.be/CfR72S_0N-4

cs.HC

Epicardium Prompt-guided Real-time Cardiac Ultrasound Frame-to-volume Registration

A comprehensive guidance view for cardiac interventional surgery can be provided by the real-time fusion of the intraoperative 2D images and preoperative 3D volume based on the ultrasound frame-to-volume registration. However, cardiac ultrasound images are characterized by a low signal-to-noise ratio and small differences between adjacent frames, coupled with significant dimension variations between 2D frames and 3D volumes to be registered, resulting in real-time and accurate cardiac ultrasound frame-to-volume registration being a very challenging task. This paper introduces a lightweight end-to-end Cardiac Ultrasound frame-to-volume Registration network, termed CU-Reg. Specifically, the proposed model leverages epicardium prompt-guided anatomical clues to reinforce the interaction of 2D sparse and 3D dense features, followed by a voxel-wise local-global aggregation of enhanced features, thereby boosting the cross-dimensional matching effectiveness of low-quality ultrasound modalities. We further embed an inter-frame discriminative regularization term within the hybrid supervised learning to increase the distinction between adjacent slices in the same ultrasound volume to ensure registration stability. Experimental results on the reprocessed CAMUS dataset demonstrate that our CU-Reg surpasses existing methods in terms of registration accuracy and efficiency, meeting the guidance requirements of clinical cardiac interventional surgery.

eess.IV

Surgical Workflow Recognition and Blocking Effectiveness Detection in Laparoscopic Liver Resections with Pringle Maneuver

Pringle maneuver (PM) in laparoscopic liver resection aims to reduce blood loss and provide a clear surgical view by intermittently blocking blood inflow of the liver, whereas prolonged PM may cause ischemic injury. To comprehensively monitor this surgical procedure and provide timely warnings of ineffective and prolonged blocking, we suggest two complementary AI-assisted surgical monitoring tasks: workflow recognition and blocking effectiveness detection in liver resections. The former presents challenges in real-time capturing of short-term PM, while the latter involves the intraoperative discrimination of long-term liver ischemia states. To address these challenges, we meticulously collect a novel dataset, called PmLR50, consisting of 25,037 video frames covering various surgical phases from 50 laparoscopic liver resection procedures. Additionally, we develop an online baseline for PmLR50, termed PmNet. This model embraces Masked Temporal Encoding (MTE) and Compressed Sequence Modeling (CSM) for efficient short-term and long-term temporal information modeling, and embeds Contrastive Prototype Separation (CPS) to enhance action discrimination between similar intraoperative operations. Experimental results demonstrate that PmNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art surgical workflow recognition methods on the PmLR50 benchmark. Our research offers potential clinical applications for the laparoscopic liver surgery community. Codes are available at https://github.com/RascalGdd/PmNet.

cs.CV

Evaluation Study on SAM 2 for Class-agnostic Instance-level Segmentation

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated powerful zero-shot segmentation performance in natural scenes. The recently released Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) has further heightened researchers' expectations towards image segmentation capabilities. To evaluate the performance of SAM2 on class-agnostic instance-level segmentation tasks, we adopt different prompt strategies for SAM2 to cope with instance-level tasks for three relevant scenarios: Salient Instance Segmentation (SIS), Camouflaged Instance Segmentation (CIS), and Shadow Instance Detection (SID). In addition, to further explore the effectiveness of SAM2 in segmenting granular object structures, we also conduct detailed tests on the high-resolution Dichotomous Image Segmentation (DIS) benchmark to assess the fine-grained segmentation capability. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results indicate that the performance of SAM2 varies significantly across different scenarios. Besides, SAM2 is not particularly sensitive to segmenting high-resolution fine details. We hope this technique report can drive the emergence of SAM2-based adapters, aiming to enhance the performance ceiling of large vision models on class-agnostic instance segmentation tasks.

cs.CV