# Deform3DGS: Flexible Deformation for Fast Surgical Scene Reconstruction with Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17835 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17835/

## Key facts

- Cited by 39 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [HexPlane: A Fast Representation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09632/) (2023)
- [Spacetime Gaussian Feature Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16812/) (2023)
- [Gaussian-Flow: 4D Reconstruction with Dynamic 3D Gaussian Particle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03431/) (2023)
- [DynMF: Neural Motion Factorization for Real-time Dynamic View Synthesis with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00112/) (2023)
- [Neural Rendering for Stereo 3D Reconstruction of Deformable Tissues in Robotic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15255/) (2022)
- [EndoSurf: Neural Surface Reconstruction of Deformable Tissues with Stereo Endoscope Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11307/) (2023)
- [Learning How To Robustly Estimate Camera Pose in Endoscopic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08023/) (2023)
- [Neural LerPlane Representations for Fast 4D Reconstruction of Deformable Tissues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19906/) (2023)
- [Reconstructing Sinus Anatomy from Endoscopic Video -- Towards a Radiation-free Approach for Quantitative Longitudinal Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08502/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Large Spatial Model: End-to-end Unposed Images to Semantic 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18956/) (2024)
- [SurgicalGS: Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting for Accurate Robotic-Assisted Surgical Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09292/) (2024)
- [Surgical Gaussian Surfels: Highly Accurate Real-time Surgical Scene Rendering using Gaussian Surfels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04079/) (2025)
- [A Review of 3D Reconstruction Techniques for Deformable Tissues in Robotic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04426/) (2024)
- [SurgTPGS: Semantic 3D Surgical Scene Understanding with Text Promptable Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23309/) (2025)
- [Deformable Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and High-Fidelity Reconstruction of Surgical Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01101/) (2025)
- [Instrument-Splatting: Controllable Photorealistic Reconstruction of Surgical Instruments Using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04082/) (2025)
- [NFL-BA: Near-Field Light Bundle Adjustment for SLAM in Dynamic Lighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13176/) (2024)
- [BridgeSplat: Bidirectionally Coupled CT and Non-Rigid Gaussian Splatting for Deformable Intraoperative Surgical Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18501/) (2025)
- [EndoWave: 4D Gaussian Splatting with Rational Wavelet for Endoscopic Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23087/) (2025)
- [LOD-GS: Level-of-Detail-Sensitive 3D Gaussian Splatting for Detail Conserved Anti-Aliasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00554/) (2025)
- [TED-4DGS: Temporally Activated and Embedding-based Deformation for 4DGS Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05446/) (2025)
- [Realistic Surgical Simulation from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02359/) (2024)
- [Endo-4DGX: Robust Endoscopic Scene Reconstruction and Illumination Correction with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23308/) (2025)
- [NRGS-SLAM: Monocular Non-Rigid SLAM for Endoscopy via Deformation-Aware 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17182/) (2026)
- [Diff2DGS: Reliable Reconstruction of Occluded Surgical Scenes via 2D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18314/) (2026)
- [ColonSplat: Reconstruction of Peristaltic Motion in Colonoscopy with Dynamic Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06860/) (2026)
- [Towards Next-Generation Healthcare: A Survey of Medical Embodied AI for Perception, Decision-Making, and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15647/) (2026)
- [Free-DyGS: Camera-Pose-Free Scene Reconstruction for Dynamic Surgical Videos with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01003/) (2024)
- [DIGS: Dynamic CBCT Reconstruction using Deformation-Informed 4D Gaussian Splatting and a Low-Rank Free-Form Deformation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22280/) (2025)
- [NeeCo: Image Synthesis of Novel Instrument States Based on Dynamic and Deformable 3D Gaussian Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07897/) (2025)
- [Moving Light Adaptive Colonoscopy Reconstruction via Illumination-Attenuation-Aware 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18739/) (2025)
- [4D Monocular Surgical Reconstruction under Arbitrary Camera Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17473/) (2026)
- [Stop Holding Your Breath: CT-Informed Gaussian Splatting for Dynamic Bronchoscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.28179/) (2026)
- [XClipGS: Exact Half-Space Clipping for Medical Volume Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07760/) (2026)
- [IXGS-Intraoperative 3D Reconstruction from Sparse, Arbitrarily Posed Real X-rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14699/) (2025)
- [Online camera-pose-free stereo endoscopic tissue deformation recovery with tissue-invariant vision-biomechanics consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19388/) (2025)
- [ColorGS: High-fidelity Surgical Scene Reconstruction with Colored Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18696/) (2025)
- [SAGS: Self-Adaptive Alias-Free Gaussian Splatting for Dynamic Surgical Endoscopic Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27318/) (2025)
- [G-SHARP: Gaussian Surgical Hardware Accelerated Real-time Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02482/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tissue deformation poses a key challenge for accurate surgical scene reconstruction. Despite yielding high reconstruction quality, existing methods suffer from slow rendering speeds and long training times, limiting their intraoperative applicability. Motivated by recent progress in 3D Gaussian Splatting, an emerging technology in real-time 3D rendering, this work presents a novel fast reconstruction framework, termed Deform3DGS, for deformable tissues during endoscopic surgery. Specifically, we introduce 3D GS into surgical scenes by integrating a point cloud initialization to improve reconstruction. Furthermore, we propose a novel flexible deformation modeling scheme (FDM) to learn tissue deformation dynamics at the level of individual Gaussians. Our FDM can model the surface deformation with efficient representations, allowing for real-time rendering performance. More importantly, FDM significantly accelerates surgical scene reconstruction, demonstrating considerable clinical values, particularly in intraoperative settings where time efficiency is crucial. Experiments on DaVinci robotic surgery videos indicate the efficacy of our approach, showcasing superior reconstruction fidelity PSNR: (37.90) and rendering speed (338.8 FPS) while substantially reducing training time to only 1 minute/scene. Our code is available at https://github.com/jinlab-imvr/Deform3DGS.