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Tom Vercauteren

11 accepted papers

2026

LEMON: A Large Endoscopic MONocular Dataset and Foundation Model for Perception in Surgical Settings

CVPR 2026

Traditional open-access datasets focusing on surgical procedures are often limited by their small size, typically consisting of fewer than 100 videos and less than 30 hours of footage, which leads to poor model generalization. To address this data limitation, a new dataset called LEMON has been comp

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Where It Moves, It Matters: Referring Surgical Instrument Segmentation via Motion

AAAI 2026technical

Enabling intuitive, language-driven interaction with surgical scenes is a critical step toward intelligent operating rooms and autonomous surgical robotic assistance. However, the task of referring segmentation, localizing surgical instruments based on natural language descriptions, remains underexp

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

OpTaS: An Optimization-based Task Specification Library for Trajectory Optimization and Model Predictive Control

ICRA 2023poster

This paper presents OpTaS, a task specification Python library for Trajectory Optimization (TO) and Model Predictive Control (MPC) in robotics. Both TO and MPC are increasingly receiving interest in optimal control and in particular handling dynamic environments. While a flurry of software libraries…

Cited by 14SourcecodeScholar
2023

Text Promptable Surgical Instrument Segmentation with Vision-Language Models

NeurIPS 2023poster

In this paper, we propose a novel text promptable surgical instrument segmentation approach to overcome challenges associated with diversity and differentiation of surgical instruments in minimally invasive surgeries. We redefine the task as text promptable, thereby enabling a more nuanced comprehen…

2022

ROS-PyBullet Interface: A Framework for Reliable Contact Simulation and Human-Robot Interaction

CoRL 2022poster

Reliable contact simulation plays a key role in the development of (semi-)autonomous robots, especially when dealing with contact-rich manipulation scenarios, an active robotics research topic. Besides simulation, components such as sensing, perception, data collection, robot hardware control, human…

Cited by 22SourcecodeScholar
2019

Robotic Control of a Multi-Modal Rigid Endoscope Combining Optical Imaging with All-Optical Ultrasound

ICRA 2019poster

Fetoscopy is a technically challenging surgery, due to the dynamic environment and low diameter endoscopes often resulting in a limited field of view. In this paper, we report on the design and operation of a robotic multimodal endoscope with optical ultrasound and white light stereo camera. The man…

Cited by 12SourceScholar
2018

From a Disposable Ureteroscope to an Active Lightweight Fetoscope - Characterization and Usability Evaluation

RA-L 2018

The twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome is a severe fetal anomaly appearing in up to 15% of identical twin pregnancies. This anomaly occurs when twins share blood vessels from a common placenta. The complication leads to an unbalanced blood transfusion between both fetuses. A current surgical treatmen

Cited by 15SourceScholar
2017

A Continuum Robot and Control Interface for Surgical Assist in Fetoscopic Interventions

RA-L 2017

Twin-twin transfusion syndrome requires interventional treatment using a fetoscopically introduced laser to sever the shared blood supply between the fetuses. This is a delicate procedure relying on small instrumentation with limited articulation to guide the laser tip and a narrow field of view to

Cited by 46SourceScholar
2017

Body wall force sensor for simulated minimally invasive surgery: Application to fetal surgery

IROS 2017poster

Surgical interventions are increasingly executed minimal invasively. Surgeons insert instruments through tiny incisions in the body and pivot slender instruments to treat organs or tissue below the surface. While a blessing for patients, surgeons need to pay extra attention to overcome the fulcrum e…

Cited by 5SourceScholar
2017

Refractive Structure-From-Motion Through a Flat Refractive Interface

ICCV 2017poster

Recovering 3D scene geometry from underwater images involves the Refractive Structure-from-Motion (RSfM) problem, where the image distortions caused by light refraction at the interface between different propagation media invalidates the single view point assumption. Direct use of the pinhole camera…

Cited by 34PDFScholar
2017

ToolNet: Holistically-nested real-time segmentation of robotic surgical tools

IROS 2017poster

Real-time tool segmentation from endoscopic videos is an essential part of many computer-assisted robotic surgical systems and of critical importance in robotic surgical data science. We propose two novel deep learning architectures for automatic segmentation of non-rigid surgical instruments. Both…

Cited by 168SourceScholar