Polyp segmentation is vital for early colorectal cancer detection, yet traditional fully supervised methods struggle with morphological variability and domain shifts, requiring frequent retraining. Additionally, reliance on large-scale annotations is a major bottleneck due to the time-consuming and error-prone nature of polyp boundary labeling. Recently, vision foundation models like Segment Anything Model (SAM) have demonstrated strong generalizability and fine-grained boundary detection with sparse prompts, effectively addressing key polyp segmentation challenges. However, SAM's prompt-dependent nature limits automation in medical applications, since manually inputting prompts for each image is labor-intensive and time-consuming. We propose OP-SAM, a One-shot Polyp segmentation framework based on SAM that automatically generates prompts from a single annotated image, ensuring accurate and generalizable segmentation without additional annotation burdens. Our method introduces Correlation-based Prior Generation (CPG) for semantic label transfer and Scale-cascaded Prior Fusion (SPF) to adapt to polyp size variations as well as filter out noisy transfers. Instead of dumping all prompts at once, we devise Euclidean Prompt Evolution (EPE) for iterative prompt refinement, progressively enhancing segmentation quality. Extensive evaluations across five datasets validate OP-SAM's effectiveness. Notably, on Kvasir, it achieves 76.93% IoU, surpassing the state-of-the-art by 11.44%.

Tracheotomy is commonly performed for patients needing prolonged intubation, airway obstruction, and neck injuries. Accurate placement of the incision and the tracheal window is paramount in order to avoid complications. Current surgical technique heavily relies on palpating cartilage landmarks on the neck to place the incision. In order to achieve the accelerated goals of the robot-assisted subtask in a tracheotomy, this paper proposes a novel autonomous palpation-based acquisition strategy - RASEC in the tracheal region, which can interactively predict the next acquisition point to maximize the expected information and minimize the costs of palpation procedure. We employ a Gaussian Process (GP) to model the distribution of hardness and utilize anatomical information as a priori input to guide the point of palpation for medical robots. The dynamic tactile sensor based on the resonant frequency is introduced to measure tissue hardness in the tracheal region by millimeter-scale contact to secure the interaction. We investigate the kernel fusion method to blend the Squared Exponential (SE) kernel with the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) kernel and optimize the Bayesian optimization search by leveraging the anatomical information of the larynx as a priori knowledge. Moreover, we further regularize the exploration and greed factors. The tactile sensor’s moving distance and the robotic base link’s rotation angle during the incision localization process are considered new factors in the acquisition strategy. Simulation and physical phantom experiments are conducted for comparison with state-of-the-art GP-based exploration approaches. The results show that the sensor’s moving distance was reduced by 53.1% and the rotation angle of the base was reduced by 75.2% of the previous values without sacrificing overall performance capabilities. The satisfying algorithmic index (average precision 0.932, average recall 0.973, average F1 score 0.952) with fewer central estimation distance errors (0.423 mm) and high resolution (1 mm) indicates the performance of the proposed RASEC in terms of exploration efficiency, cost awareness, and localization accuracy for incision localization and recommendation in real robot-assisted subtask in the tracheotomy procedure.Note to Practitioners—This work is well motivated to introduce the Level of Autonomy (LoA) 2 - task-level autonomy, specifically in the context of tracheotomy procedures. The incorporation of robotic palpation techniques aims to provide surgeons with enhanced capabilities for incision recommendations, which directly benefit surgeons to visualize hands-on information and localize the trachea regions more efficiently and further reduce cognitive load. To detect the trachea region for intubation incision without costly ergodic acquisition, this article suggests a highly efficient acquisition strategy utilizing the fusion kernel function and regularized impact factors, eliminating the time consumption for such localization task. The actual clinical value is that our proposed strategy can earn more time for further increasing the probability of patient resuscitation, to facilitate supervised autonomy in the real clinic scene.

In recent years, great progress has been made in forecasting human motion in crowded scenes. However, current methods are far from practical applications due to the unbearable high computation costs, especially for encoding scene context. In addition, neglecting the partially detected trajectories makes the predicted outcome deviate from the real trajectory distribution. To handle the aforementioned concerns, we propose to represent the scene context and partially observed trajectories with sparse graphs. Customized for this special data structure, we design a hierarchical Graph Transformer Network model SparseGTN to predict multiple possible future trajectories of the target pedestrian by digesting the sparsely represented inputs. Our approach exhibits superiority over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, utilizing a mere 3.42% of the number of floating point operations (FLOPs) and 0.53% of the number of model parameters. The code will be available online⋆.

Sampling-based path planning algorithms usually implement uniform sampling methods to search the state space. However, uniform sampling may lead to unnecessary exploration in many scenarios, such as the environment with a few dead ends. Our previous work proposes to use the promising region to guide the sampling process to address the issue. However, the predicted promising regions are often disconnected, which means they cannot connect the start and goal states, resulting in a lack of probabilistic completeness. This work focuses on enhancing the connectivity of predicted promising regions. Our proposed method regresses the connectivity probability of the edges in the x and y directions. In addition, it calculates the weight of the promising edges in loss to guide the neural network to pay more attention to the connectivity of the promising regions. We conduct a series of simulation experiments, and the results show that the connectivity of promising regions improves significantly. Furthermore, we analyze the effect of connectivity on sampling-based path planning algorithms and conclude that connectivity plays an essential role in maintaining algorithm performance.Note to Practitioners—This work is derived from the promising region prediction for sampling-based path planning. The sampling-based path planning methods have been widely used in robotics due to their efficiency. To further improve the efficiency of these algorithms, sampling in the promising region predicted by a neural network is introduced into the sampling procedure. However, the connectivity of the promising region has yet to be considered, and it will affect the performance of the algorithms in several aspects. To demonstrate this problem, we compare the performance of the neural heuristic algorithms under different connectivity statuses in this paper. Furthermore, to enhance the connectivity of the predicted promising region, the novel prediction output and loss function are proposed. The simulation results show improvements in the algorithms after utilizing our method.

This paper presents a search-based partial motion planner for generating feasible trajectories of car-like robots in highly dynamic environments. The planner searches for smooth, safe, and near-time-optimal trajectories by exploring a state graph built on motion primitives. To enable fast online planning, we propose an efficient path searching algorithm based on the aggregation and pruning of motion primitives. We then propose a fast collision checking algorithm that takes into account the motions of moving obstacles. The algorithm linearizes relative motions between the robot and obstacles, and then checks collisions by calculating a point-line distance. Benefiting from the fast searching and collision checking algorithms, the planner can effectively explore the state-time space to generate near-time-optimal solutions. Experiments show that the proposed method can generate feasible trajectories within milliseconds while maintaining a higher success rate than up-to-date methods, which significantly demonstrates its advantages.

Human activities are hugely restricted by COVID-19, recently. Robots that can conduct inter-floor navigation attract much public attention since they can substitute human workers to conduct the service work. However, current robots either depend on human assistance or elevator retrofitting, and fully autonomous inter-floor navigation is still not available. As the very first step of inter-floor navigation, elevator button segmentation and recognition hold an important position. Therefore, we release the first large-scale publicly available elevator panel dataset in this work, containing 3,718 panel images with 35,100 button labels, to facilitate more powerful algorithms on autonomous elevator operation. Together with the dataset, a number of deep learning based implementations for button segmentation and recognition are also released to benchmark future methods in the community. The dataset is available at https://github.com/zhudelong/elevator_button_recognition