# Feature-EndoGaussian: Feature Distilled Gaussian Splatting in Surgical Deformable Scene Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06161 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06161/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [GIRAFFE: Representing Scenes as Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12100/) (2020)
- [Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00889/) (2019)
- [Decomposing NeRF for Editing via Feature Field Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15585/) (2022)
- [Feature 3DGS: Supercharging 3D Gaussian Splatting to Enable Distilled Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03203/) (2023)
- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03890/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Stereo Depth Estimation From a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02910/) (2020)
- [Panoptic Lifting for 3D Scene Understanding with Neural Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09802/) (2022)
- [Neural Rendering for Stereo 3D Reconstruction of Deformable Tissues in Robotic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15255/) (2022)
- [MA-SAM: Modality-agnostic SAM Adaptation for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08842/) (2023)
- [DreamScene360: Unconstrained Text-to-3D Scene Generation with Panoramic Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06903/) (2024)
- [Foundation Model for Endoscopy Video Analysis via Large-scale Self-supervised Pre-train](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16741/) (2023)
- [EndoSurf: Neural Surface Reconstruction of Deformable Tissues with Stereo Endoscope Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11307/) (2023)
- [SuPer: A Surgical Perception Framework for Endoscopic Tissue Manipulation with Surgical Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05405/) (2019)
- [E-DSSR: Efficient Dynamic Surgical Scene Reconstruction with Transformer-based Stereoscopic Depth Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00229/) (2021)
- [Neural LerPlane Representations for Fast 4D Reconstruction of Deformable Tissues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19906/) (2023)
- [EndoGSLAM: Real-Time Dense Reconstruction and Tracking in Endoscopic Surgeries using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15124/) (2024)
- [SurfelWarp: Efficient Non-Volumetric Single View Dynamic Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.13073/) (2019)
- [SuPer Deep: A Surgical Perception Framework for Robotic Tissue Manipulation using Deep Learning for Feature Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03472/) (2020)
- [Reconstructing Sinus Anatomy from Endoscopic Video -- Towards a Radiation-free Approach for Quantitative Longitudinal Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08502/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Reconstruction of Deformable Soft-tissue with Stereo Scope in Minimal Invasive Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10867/) (2020)
- [EndoGaussian: Real-time Gaussian Splatting for Dynamic Endoscopic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12561/) (2024)
- [LGS: A Light-weight 4D Gaussian Splatting for Efficient Surgical Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16073/) (2024)
- [SurgicalGS: Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting for Accurate Robotic-Assisted Surgical Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09292/) (2024)
- [ASPS: Augmented Segment Anything Model for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00718/) (2024)
- [A comprehensive survey on recent deep learning-based methods applied to surgical data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01435/) (2022)
- [Classification of Endoscopy and Video Capsule Images using CNN-Transformer Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10733/) (2024)
- [Colonoscopy polyp detection with massive endoscopic images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08730/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) requires high-fidelity, real-time visual feedback of dynamic and low-texture surgical scenes. To address these requirements, we introduce FeatureEndo-4DGS (FE-4DGS), the first real time pipeline leveraging feature-distilled 4D Gaussian Splatting for simultaneous reconstruction and semantic segmentation of deformable surgical environments. Unlike prior feature-distilled methods restricted to static scenes, and existing 4D approaches that lack semantic integration, FE-4DGS seamlessly leverages pre-trained 2D semantic embeddings to produce a unified 4D representation-where semantics also deform with tissue motion. This unified approach enables the generation of real-time RGB and semantic outputs through a single, parallelized rasterization process. Despite the additional complexity from feature distillation, FE-4DGS sustains real-time rendering (61 FPS) with a compact footprint, achieves state-of-the-art rendering fidelity on EndoNeRF (39.1 PSNR) and SCARED (27.3 PSNR), and delivers competitive EndoVis18 segmentation, matching or exceeding strong 2D baselines for binary segmentation tasks (0.93 DSC) and remaining competitive for multi-label segmentation (0.77 DSC).