arXiv subjects

Shing Shin Cheng

Publications and source records attributed to Shing Shin Cheng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Capstan-driven Continuum Surgical Robot: Design, Modeling, and Perception

Shape and force sensing have long been critical bottlenecks in the development of compact capstan-driven continuum surgical robots, primarily due to the difficulty of obtaining cable tension information within the confined capstan assembly. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents an integrated design-modeling-sensing approach based on the concept of actuation-perception co-design. A compliant element is introduced into the motor mounting bracket of the drive system, enabling micro-deformation under the cable reaction force and thereby allowing real-time cable tension measurement without occupying the compact capstan space. To address the modeling complexity arising from unconventional joint configurations introduced by the spatial cable routing strategy, a parallel computation framework based on a multibody short-thick-beam model is proposed, which captures shear effects in short beam segments and synergistic multi-cable interactions while achieving real-time performance. Building on this framework, stable shape and force sensing is achieved by incorporating a proximal multi-axis force/torque sensor as an additional measurement anchor. Following this design-modeling-sensing framework, capstan-driven continuum surgical robots with single- and dual-segment configurations are developed. Experimental results validate the proposed framework in both single- and dual-segment continuum robots, demonstrating real-time tip pose estimation together with contact force and location perception. By enabling cable tension feedback without compromising the compact capstan architecture, the proposed framework makes integrated perception feasible for capstan-driven continuum surgical robots.

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arXiv2026

ExtraGS: Enhancing Endoscopic View Extrapolation via Diffusion-Guided 3D Gaussian Splatting

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (MIS) critically depends on reliable endoscopic perception for navigation and safety. However, conventional endoscopes provide only a limited field of view, leaving large portions of the surrounding anatomy unobserved. Recent neural rendering approaches, such as Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting, enable novel view synthesis from endoscopic videos, but their reliance on sparse observations often leads to severe artifacts when extrapolating beyond the training trajectory. In this work, we propose ExtraGS, a framework for enhancing endoscopic view extrapolation through diffusion-guided 3D Gaussian Splatting. Starting from an initial reconstruction, we introduce an uncertainty-guided virtual camera sampling strategy to actively explore blind spots and maximize information gain. The rendered views from these sampled locations are refined using a diffusion model to recover plausible anatomical structures, producing pseudo-observations that guide further optimization. To prevent the generated content from degrading reliable regions, we adopt a confidence-weighted fine-tuning strategy when incorporating these pseudo-observations. Extensive experiments on multiple public endoscopic datasets demonstrate that ExtraGS significantly reduces extrapolation artifacts and achieves state-of-the-art performance in endoscopic novel view synthesis.

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arXiv2026

DreamReg: Belief-Driven World Model for 2D-3D Ultrasound Registration

Ultrasound (US) is widely used for surgical navigation, yet real-time registration between intraoperative 2D slices and preoperative 3D volumes remains challenging due to partial observability, speckle noise, and the action-dependent US acquisition. Existing methods are one-shot or short-horizon, making it hard for them to gather evidence over time or capture how surgeons adjust probe motion based on on-screen feedback. We propose DreamReg, a belief-driven world-model framework that formulates 2D-3D registration as belief updating over rigid transformations. DreamReg maintains a latent belief state that summarizes past observations and poses information, and continuously refines the transformation through learned dynamics as new slices arrive. During training, DreamReg is exposed to probe-motion trajectories that mimic clinical scanning behavior and learns to update its belief by conditioning pose refinement on the current US observation. During inference, DreamReg refines registration via internal imagination: it rolls out the learned world model to simulate candidate probe motions and their predicted observations, and integrates these imagined outcomes to converge to an accurate rigid transformation. Experiments on CAMUS and u-RegPro datasets demonstrate improved robustness and competitive registration accuracy for real-time guidance compared with state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2026

Stiffness Optimization for Concentrated Bending in Magnetically Actuated Catheters: Maintaining Steerability under Gradient Stiffness

Achieving both efficient pushability (propulsion transmission) and proximally concentrated bending for steerability is challenging for magnetically actuated soft catheters: higher axial/bending stiffness improves force transmission but reduces steerability, whereas lower stiffness enables large, proximally concentrated bending yet increases kinking/buckling risk under compressive push loads. To address this trade-off, we propose a stiffness-optimized multi-segment magnetically actuated catheter (SO-MAC) that integrates a decoupled steering-advancement mechanism with a gradient-stiffness architecture. The SO-MAC concentrates bending about a stable proximal pivot during advancement while the distal section passively self-straightens to transmit propulsion, aided by the optimized stiffness distribution and elastic recovery of the spring backbone against friction-induced kinking/buckling. Over $0{-}180^{\circ}$ combined steering and advancement, the pivot remained stable and the distal tip advanced near-straight toward the target direction. A 1.5 mm-diameter SO-MAC achieved up to $180^{\circ}$ steering with a 3 mm bending radius at its 10 mm tip, with an average shape error of $1.39 \pm 0.56$ mm and a steering-pivot error of $0.35 \pm 0.10$ mm. Visual feedback control in a bronchial phantom further confirmed robust navigation through highly curved, bifurcating paths.

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arXiv2026

Information-Theoretic Geometry Optimization and Physics-Aware Learning for Calibration-Free Magnetic Localization

Wireless localization of permanent magnets enables occlusion-free guidance for medical interventions, yet its practical accuracy is fundamentally limited by two coupled challenges: the poor observability of conventional planar sensor arrays and the simulation-to-reality (Sim-to-Real) gap of learning-based estimators. To address these issues, this article presents a unified framework that combines information-theoretic sensor geometry optimization with physics-aware deep learning. First, a rigorous Fisher Information Matrix (FIM)-based evaluation framework is established to quantify geometry-induced observability limitations. The results show that a staggered split-array topology provides a substantially stronger observability foundation for localization while remaining compatible with practical external deployment. Second, building on this optimized sensing configuration, we propose Phy-GAANet, a calibration-free estimator trained entirely on hardware-aware synthetic data. By incorporating Physics-Informed Features (PIF) for saturation modeling and Geometry-Aware Attention (GAA) for preserving cross-layer vector structure, the network effectively bridges the Sim-to-Real gap. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving a position error of 1.84 mm and an orientation error of 3.18 degrees at a refresh rate exceeding 270 Hz. The proposed method consistently outperforms classical Levenberg--Marquardt solvers and generic convolutional baselines, particularly in suppressing catastrophic outliers and maintaining robustness in challenging near-field boundary regions. Beyond the proposed network, the FIM-guided analysis also provides a framework for sensor geometry design in magnetic localization systems under practical deployment constraints.

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arXiv2026

A Vision-Language-Action Model for Adaptive Ultrasound-Guided Needle Insertion and Needle Tracking

Ultrasound (US)-guided needle insertion is a critical yet challenging procedure due to dynamic imaging conditions and difficulties in needle visualization. Many methods have been proposed for automated needle insertion, but they often rely on hand-crafted pipelines with modular controllers, whose performance degrades in challenging cases. In this paper, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model is proposed for adaptive and automated US-guided needle insertion and tracking on a robotic ultrasound (RUS) system. This framework provides a unified approach to needle tracking and needle insertion control, enabling real-time, dynamically adaptive adjustment of insertion based on the obtained needle position and environment awareness. To achieve real-time and end-to-end tracking, a Cross-Depth Fusion (CDF) tracking head is proposed, integrating shallow positional and deep semantic features from the large-scale vision backbone. To adapt the pretrained vision backbone for tracking tasks, a Tracking-Conditioning (TraCon) register is introduced for parameter-efficient feature conditioning. After needle tracking, an uncertainty-aware control policy and an asynchronous VLA pipeline are presented for adaptive needle insertion control, ensuring timely decision-making for improved safety and outcomes. Extensive experiments on both needle tracking and insertion show that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art trackers and manual operation, achieving higher tracking accuracy, improved insertion success rates, and reduced procedure time, highlighting promising directions for RUS-based intelligent intervention.

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arXiv2026

Open-H-Embodiment: A Large-Scale Dataset for Enabling Foundation Models in Medical Robotics

Autonomous medical robots hold promise to improve patient outcomes, reduce provider workload, democratize access to care, and enable superhuman precision. However, autonomous medical robotics has been limited by a fundamental data problem: existing medical robotic datasets are small, single-embodiment, and rarely shared openly, restricting the development of foundation models that the field needs to advance. We introduce Open-H-Embodiment, the largest open dataset of medical robotic video with synchronized kinematics to date, spanning more than 50 institutions and multiple robotic platforms including the CMR Versius, Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci, da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK), Rob Surgical BiTrack, Virtual Incision's MIRA, Moon Surgical Maestro, and a variety of custom systems, spanning surgical manipulation, robotic ultrasound, and endoscopy procedures. We demonstrate the research enabled by this dataset through two foundation models. GR00T-H is the first open foundation vision-language-action model for medical robotics, which is the only evaluated model to achieve full end-to-end task completion on a structured suturing benchmark (25% of trials vs. 0% for all others) and achieves 64% average success across a 29-step ex vivo suturing sequence. We also train Cosmos-H-Surgical-Simulator, the first action-conditioned world model to enable multi-embodiment surgical simulation from a single checkpoint, spanning nine robotic platforms and supporting in silico policy evaluation and synthetic data generation for the medical domain. These results suggest that open, large-scale medical robot data collection can serve as critical infrastructure for the research community, enabling advances in robot learning, world modeling, and beyond.

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arXiv2026

Cable-driven Continuum Robotics: Proprioception via Proximal-integrated Force Sensing

Micro-scale continuum robots face significant limitations in achieving three-dimensional contact force perception, primarily due to structural miniaturization, nonlinear mechanical, and sensor integration. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces a novel proprioception method for cable-driven continuum robots based on proximal-integrated force sensing (i.e., cable tension and six-axis force/torque (F/T) sensor), inspired by the tendon-joint collaborative sensing mechanism of the finger. By integrating biomechanically inspired design principles with nonlinear modeling, the proposed method addresses the challenge of force perception (including the three-dimensional contact force and the location of the contact point) and shape estimation in micro-scale continuum robots. First, a quasi-bionic mapping between human tissues/organs and robot components is established, enabling the transfer of the integrated sensing strategy of tendons, joints, and neural feedback to the robotic system. Second, a multimodal perception strategy is developed based on the structural constraints inherent to continuum robots. The complex relationships among mechanical and material nonlinearities, robot motion states, and contact forces are formulated as an optimization problem to reduce the perception complexity. Finally, experimental validation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method. This work lays the foundation for developing safer and smarter continuum robots, enabling broader clinical adoption in complex environments.

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arXiv2026

Leveraging Geometric Prior Uncertainty and Complementary Constraints for High-Fidelity Neural Indoor Surface Reconstruction

Neural implicit surface reconstruction with signed distance function has made significant progress, but recovering fine details such as thin structures and complex geometries remains challenging due to unreliable or noisy geometric priors. Existing approaches rely on implicit uncertainty that arises during optimization to filter these priors, which is indirect and inefficient, and masking supervision in high-uncertainty regions further leads to under-constrained optimization. To address these issues, we propose GPU-SDF, a neural implicit framework for indoor surface reconstruction that leverages geometric prior uncertainty and complementary constraints. We introduce a self-supervised module that explicitly estimates prior uncertainty without auxiliary networks. Based on this estimation, we design an uncertainty-guided loss that modulates prior influence rather than discarding it, thereby retaining weak but informative cues. To address regions with high prior uncertainty, GPU-SDF further incorporates two complementary constraints: an edge distance field that strengthens boundary supervision and a multi-view consistency regularization that enforces geometric coherence. Extensive experiments confirm that GPU-SDF improves the reconstruction of fine details and serves as a plug-and-play enhancement for existing frameworks. Source code will be available at https://github.com/IRMVLab/GPU-SDF

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arXiv2026

NRGS-SLAM: Monocular Non-Rigid SLAM for Endoscopy via Deformation-Aware 3D Gaussian Splatting

Visual simultaneous localization and mapping (V-SLAM) is a fundamental capability for autonomous perception and navigation. However, endoscopic scenes violate the rigidity assumption due to persistent soft-tissue deformations, creating a strong coupling ambiguity between camera ego-motion and intrinsic deformation. Although recent monocular non-rigid SLAM methods have made notable progress, they often lack effective decoupling mechanisms and rely on sparse or low-fidelity scene representations, which leads to tracking drift and limited reconstruction quality. To address these limitations, we propose NRGS-SLAM, a monocular non-rigid SLAM system for endoscopy based on 3D Gaussian Splatting. To resolve the coupling ambiguity, we introduce a deformation-aware 3D Gaussian map that augments each Gaussian primitive with a learnable deformation probability, optimized via a Bayesian self-supervision strategy without requiring external non-rigidity labels. Building on this representation, we design a deformable tracking module that performs robust coarse-to-fine pose estimation by prioritizing low-deformation regions, followed by efficient per-frame deformation updates. A carefully designed deformable mapping module progressively expands and refines the map, balancing representational capacity and computational efficiency. In addition, a unified robust geometric loss incorporates external geometric priors to mitigate the inherent ill-posedness of monocular non-rigid SLAM. Extensive experiments on multiple public endoscopic datasets demonstrate that NRGS-SLAM achieves more accurate camera pose estimation (up to 50\% reduction in RMSE) and higher-quality photo-realistic reconstructions than state-of-the-art methods. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of our key design choices. Source code will be publicly available upon paper acceptance.

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arXiv2026

4D Monocular Surgical Reconstruction under Arbitrary Camera Motions

Reconstructing deformable surgical scenes from endoscopic videos is challenging and clinically important. Recent state-of-the-art methods based on implicit neural representations or 3D Gaussian splatting have made notable progress. However, most are designed for deformable scenes with fixed endoscope viewpoints and rely on stereo depth priors or accurate structure-from-motion for initialization and optimization, limiting their ability to handle monocular sequences with large camera motion in real clinical settings. To address this, we propose Local-EndoGS, a high-quality 4D reconstruction framework for monocular endoscopic sequences with arbitrary camera motion. Local-EndoGS introduces a progressive, window-based global representation that allocates local deformable scene models to each observed window, enabling scalability to long sequences with substantial motion. To overcome unreliable initialization without stereo depth or accurate structure-from-motion, we design a coarse-to-fine strategy integrating multi-view geometry, cross-window information, and monocular depth priors, providing a robust foundation for optimization. We further incorporate long-range 2D pixel trajectory constraints and physical motion priors to improve deformation plausibility. Experiments on three public endoscopic datasets with deformable scenes and varying camera motions show that Local-EndoGS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in appearance quality and geometry. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our key designs. Code will be released upon acceptance at: https://github.com/IRMVLab/Local-EndoGS.

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arXiv2025

MrTrack: Register Mamba for Needle Tracking with Rapid Reciprocating Motion during Ultrasound-Guided Aspiration Biopsy

Ultrasound-guided fine needle aspiration (FNA) biopsy is a common minimally invasive diagnostic procedure. However, an aspiration needle tracker addressing rapid reciprocating motion is still missing. MrTrack, an aspiration needle tracker with a mamba-based register mechanism, is proposed. MrTrack leverages a Mamba-based register extractor to sequentially distill global context from each historical search map, storing these temporal cues in a register bank. The Mamba-based register retriever then retrieves temporal prompts from the register bank to provide external cues when current vision features are temporarily unusable due to rapid reciprocating motion and imaging degradation. A self-supervised register diversify loss is proposed to encourage feature diversity and dimension independence within the learned register, mitigating feature collapse. Comprehensive experiments conducted on both robotic and manual aspiration biopsy datasets demonstrate that MrTrack not only outperforms state-of-the-art trackers in accuracy and robustness but also achieves superior inference efficiency. Project page: https://github.com/PieceZhang/MrTrack

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arXiv2025

Theoretical Data-Driven MobilePosenet: Lightweight Neural Network for Accurate Calibration-Free 5-DOF Magnet Localization

Permanent magnet tracking using the external sensor array is crucial for the accurate localization of wireless capsule endoscope robots. Traditional tracking algorithms, based on the magnetic dipole model and Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm, face challenges related to computational delays and the need for initial position estimation. More recently proposed neural network-based approaches often require extensive hardware calibration and real-world data collection, which are time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address these challenges, we propose MobilePosenet, a lightweight neural network architecture that leverages depthwise separable convolutions to minimize computational cost and a channel attention mechanism to enhance localization accuracy. Besides, the inputs to the network integrate the sensors' coordinate information and random noise, compensating for the discrepancies between the theoretical model and the actual magnetic fields and thus allowing MobilePosenet to be trained entirely on theoretical data. Experimental evaluations conducted in a $90 \times 90 \times 80$ mm workspace demonstrate that MobilePosenet exhibits excellent 5-DOF localization accuracy ($1.54 \pm 1.03$ mm and $2.24 \pm 1.84^{\circ}$) and inference speed (0.9 ms) against state-of-the-art methods trained on real-world data. Since network training relies solely on theoretical data, MobilePosenet can eliminate the hardware calibration and real-world data collection process, improving the generalizability of this permanent magnet localization method and the potential for rapid adoption in different clinical settings.

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arXiv2025

Deformable Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and High-Fidelity Reconstruction of Surgical Scenes

Efficient and high-fidelity reconstruction of deformable surgical scenes is a critical yet challenging task. Building on recent advancements in 3D Gaussian splatting, current methods have seen significant improvements in both reconstruction quality and rendering speed. However, two major limitations remain: (1) difficulty in handling irreversible dynamic changes, such as tissue shearing, which are common in surgical scenes; and (2) the lack of hierarchical modeling for surgical scene deformation, which reduces rendering speed. To address these challenges, we introduce EH-SurGS, an efficient and high-fidelity reconstruction algorithm for deformable surgical scenes. We propose a deformation modeling approach that incorporates the life cycle of 3D Gaussians, effectively capturing both regular and irreversible deformations, thus enhancing reconstruction quality. Additionally, we present an adaptive motion hierarchy strategy that distinguishes between static and deformable regions within the surgical scene. This strategy reduces the number of 3D Gaussians passing through the deformation field, thereby improving rendering speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches in both reconstruction quality and rendering speed. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness and necessity of our proposed components. We will open-source our code upon acceptance of the paper.

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arXiv2024

MambaXCTrack: Mamba-based Tracker with SSM Cross-correlation and Motion Prompt for Ultrasound Needle Tracking

Ultrasound (US)-guided needle insertion is widely employed in percutaneous interventions. However, providing feedback on the needle tip position via US imaging presents challenges due to noise, artifacts, and the thin imaging plane of US, which degrades needle features and leads to intermittent tip visibility. In this paper, a Mamba-based US needle tracker MambaXCTrack utilizing structured state space models cross-correlation (SSMX-Corr) and implicit motion prompt is proposed, which is the first application of Mamba in US needle tracking. The SSMX-Corr enhances cross-correlation by long-range modeling and global searching of distant semantic features between template and search maps, benefiting the tracking under noise and artifacts by implicitly learning potential distant semantic cues. By combining with cross-map interleaved scan (CIS), local pixel-wise interaction with positional inductive bias can also be introduced to SSMX-Corr. The implicit low-level motion descriptor is proposed as a non-visual prompt to enhance tracking robustness, addressing the intermittent tip visibility problem. Extensive experiments on a dataset with motorized needle insertion in both phantom and tissue samples demonstrate that the proposed tracker outperforms other state-of-the-art trackers while ablation studies further highlight the effectiveness of each proposed tracking module.

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arXiv2024

Refined Motion Compensation with Soft Laser Manipulators using Data-Driven Surrogate Models

Non-contact laser ablation, a precise thermal technique, simultaneously cuts and coagulates tissue without the insertion errors associated with rigid needles. Human organ motions, such as those in the liver, exhibit rhythmic components influenced by respiratory and cardiac cycles, making effective laser energy delivery to target lesions while compensating for tumor motion crucial. This research introduces a data-driven method to derive surrogate models of a soft manipulator. These low-dimensional models offer computational efficiency when integrated into the Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework, while still capturing the manipulator's dynamics with and without control input. Spectral Submanifolds (SSM) theory models the manipulator's autonomous dynamics, acknowledging its tendency to reach equilibrium when external forces are removed. Preliminary results show that the MPC controller using the surrogate model outperforms two other models within the same MPC framework. The data-driven MPC controller also supports a design-agnostic feature, allowing the interchangeability of different soft manipulators within the laser ablation surgery robot system.

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arXiv2024

Simultaneous Estimation of Shape and Force along Highly Deformable Surgical Manipulators Using Sparse FBG Measurement

Recently, fiber optic sensors such as fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) have been widely investigated for shape reconstruction and force estimation of flexible surgical robots. However, most existing approaches need precise model parameters of FBGs inside the fiber and their alignments with the flexible robots for accurate sensing results. Another challenge lies in online acquiring external forces at arbitrary locations along the flexible robots, which is highly required when with large deflections in robotic surgery. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven paradigm for simultaneous estimation of shape and force along highly deformable flexible robots by using sparse strain measurement from a single-core FBG fiber. A thin-walled soft sensing tube helically embedded with FBG sensors is designed for a robotic-assisted flexible ureteroscope with large deflection up to 270 degrees and a bend radius under 10 mm. We introduce and study three learning models by incorporating spatial strain encoders, and compare their performances in both free space and constrained environments with contact forces at different locations. The experimental results in terms of dynamic shape-force sensing accuracy demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed methods.

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arXiv2024

Quaternion-Based Attitude Stabilization Using Synergistic Hybrid Feedback With Minimal Potential Functions

This paper investigates the robust global attitude stabilization problem for a rigid-body system using quaternion-based feedback. We propose a novel synergistic hybrid feedback with the following notable features: (1) It demonstrates central synergism by utilizing a minimal number of potential functions; (2) It ensures consistency with respect to the unit quaternion representation of rigid-body attitude; (3) Its state-feedback laws incorporate a shared action term that steers the system toward the desired attitude. We demonstrate that the proposed hybrid feedback method effectively solves the problem at hand and guarantees robust uniform global asymptotic stability.

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