arXiv:2603.26720cs.ROcs.AI2026-03

用像素级强化学习预测手术缝合轨迹,提升机器人操作的精准与安全。

SutureFormer: Learning Surgical Trajectories via Goal-conditioned Offline RL in Pixel Space

  • 将缝合针轨迹建模为像素空间中的逐步决策问题,捕捉运动连续性。
  • 在1158条真实患者数据上,平均位移误差降低58.6%,显著优于基线。
  • 适用于缺乏密集标注的医疗视觉任务,适合手术机器人系统研发者。

从内窥镜视频中预测手术缝合针轨迹对机器人辅助缝合至关重要,可实现前瞻规划、实时引导和更安全的运动执行。现有方法直接从视觉观测学习运动分布,往往忽略相邻动作间的序列依赖性。此外,稀疏的路径点标注难以提供充分监督,进一步加剧了监督或模仿学习的难度。为此,我们将基于图像的针轨迹预测建模为序列决策问题,将针尖视为在像素空间中逐步移动的智能体。该设定自然捕捉了针运动的连续性,并显式建模随时间变化的物理合理像素状态转移。在此框架下,提出SutureFormer:一种目标条件下的离线强化学习方法,通过三次样条插值将稀疏标注转化为稠密奖励信号,使策略在利用有限专家指导的同时探索合理的未来运动路径。SutureFormer使用观察编码器处理变长视频片段,捕获局部空间线索与长程时序动态,并通过由离散方向与连续幅度组成的动作自回归预测未来路径点。为实现从专家示范中稳定优化离线策略,采用带行为克隆正则化的保守Q学习。在包含50名患者共1158条缝合轨迹的新肾部伤口缝合数据集上的实验表明,与最强基线相比,SutureFormer将平均位移误差降低58.6%,验证了将针轨迹预测建模为像素级序列动作学习的有效性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Predicting surgical needle trajectories from endoscopic video is critical for robot-assisted suturing, enabling anticipatory planning, real-time guidance, and safer motion execution. Existing methods that directly learn motion distributions from visual observations tend to overlook the sequential dependency among adjacent motion steps. Moreover, sparse waypoint annotations often fail to provide sufficient supervision, further increasing the difficulty of supervised or imitation learning methods. To address these challenges, we formulate image-based needle trajectory prediction as a sequential decision-making problem, in which the needle tip is treated as an agent that moves step by step in pixel space. This formulation naturally captures the continuity of needle motion and enables the explicit modeling of physically plausible pixel-wise state transitions over time. From this perspective, we propose SutureFormer, a goal-conditioned offline reinforcement learning framework that leverages sparse annotations to dense reward signals via cubic spline interpolation, encouraging the policy to exploit limited expert guidance while exploring plausible future motion paths. SutureFormer encodes variable-length clips using an observation encoder to capture both local spatial cues and long-range temporal dynamics, and autoregressively predicts future waypoints through actions composed of discrete directions and continuous magnitudes. To enable stable offline policy optimization from expert demonstrations, we adopt Conservative Q-Learning with Behavioral Cloning regularization. Experiments on a new kidney wound suturing dataset containing 1,158 trajectories from 50 patients show that SutureFormer reduces Average Displacement Error by 58.6% compared with the strongest baseline, demonstrating the effectiveness of modeling needle trajectory prediction as pixel-level sequential action learning.

手术机器人强化学习轨迹预测离线学习

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