AffordTissue: Dense Affordance Prediction for Tool-Action Specific Tissue Interaction

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Maksutova, Aiza, Seenivasan, Lalithkumar, Ding, Hao, Xu, Jiru, Yu, Chenhao, Jing, Chenyan, Shen, Yiqing, Unberath, Mathias
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Maksutova, Aiza
Seenivasan, Lalithkumar
Ding, Hao
Xu, Jiru
Yu, Chenhao
Jing, Chenyan
Shen, Yiqing
Unberath, Mathias
author_facet Maksutova, Aiza
Seenivasan, Lalithkumar
Ding, Hao
Xu, Jiru
Yu, Chenhao
Jing, Chenyan
Shen, Yiqing
Unberath, Mathias
contents Surgical action automation has progressed rapidly toward achieving surgeon-like dexterous control, driven primarily by advances in learning from demonstration and vision-language-action models. While these have demonstrated success in table-top experiments, translating them to clinical deployment remains challenging: current methods offer limited predictability on where instruments will interact on tissue surfaces and lack explicit conditioning inputs to enforce tool-action-specific safe interaction regions. Addressing this gap, we introduce AffordTissue, a multimodal framework for predicting tool-action specific tissue affordance regions as dense heatmaps during cholecystectomy. Our approach combines a temporal vision encoder capturing tool motion and tissue dynamics across multiple viewpoints, language conditioning enabling generalization across diverse instrument-action pairs, and a DiT-style decoder for dense affordance prediction. We establish the first tissue affordance benchmark by curating and annotating 15,638 video clips across 103 cholecystectomy procedures, covering six unique tool-action pairs involving four instruments (hook, grasper, scissors, clipper) and their associated tasks: dissection, grasping, clipping, and cutting. Experiments demonstrate substantial improvement over vision-language model baselines (20.6 px ASSD vs. 60.2 px for Molmo-VLM), showing that our task-specific architecture outperforms large-scale foundation models for dense surgical affordance prediction. By predicting tool-action specific tissue affordance regions, AffordTissue provides explicit spatial reasoning for safe surgical automation, potentially unlocking explicit policy guidance toward appropriate tissue regions and early safe stop when instruments deviate outside predicted safe zones.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_01371
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AffordTissue: Dense Affordance Prediction for Tool-Action Specific Tissue Interaction
Maksutova, Aiza
Seenivasan, Lalithkumar
Ding, Hao
Xu, Jiru
Yu, Chenhao
Jing, Chenyan
Shen, Yiqing
Unberath, Mathias
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Image and Video Processing
Surgical action automation has progressed rapidly toward achieving surgeon-like dexterous control, driven primarily by advances in learning from demonstration and vision-language-action models. While these have demonstrated success in table-top experiments, translating them to clinical deployment remains challenging: current methods offer limited predictability on where instruments will interact on tissue surfaces and lack explicit conditioning inputs to enforce tool-action-specific safe interaction regions. Addressing this gap, we introduce AffordTissue, a multimodal framework for predicting tool-action specific tissue affordance regions as dense heatmaps during cholecystectomy. Our approach combines a temporal vision encoder capturing tool motion and tissue dynamics across multiple viewpoints, language conditioning enabling generalization across diverse instrument-action pairs, and a DiT-style decoder for dense affordance prediction. We establish the first tissue affordance benchmark by curating and annotating 15,638 video clips across 103 cholecystectomy procedures, covering six unique tool-action pairs involving four instruments (hook, grasper, scissors, clipper) and their associated tasks: dissection, grasping, clipping, and cutting. Experiments demonstrate substantial improvement over vision-language model baselines (20.6 px ASSD vs. 60.2 px for Molmo-VLM), showing that our task-specific architecture outperforms large-scale foundation models for dense surgical affordance prediction. By predicting tool-action specific tissue affordance regions, AffordTissue provides explicit spatial reasoning for safe surgical automation, potentially unlocking explicit policy guidance toward appropriate tissue regions and early safe stop when instruments deviate outside predicted safe zones.
title AffordTissue: Dense Affordance Prediction for Tool-Action Specific Tissue Interaction
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01371