# ColonSplat: Reconstruction of Peristaltic Motion in Colonoscopy with Dynamic Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06860 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06860/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [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)
- [HexPlane: A Fast Representation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09632/) (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)
- [Endo-4DGS: Endoscopic Monocular Scene Reconstruction with 4D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16416/) (2024)
- [Deform3DGS: Flexible Deformation for Fast Surgical Scene Reconstruction with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17835/) (2024)
- [EndoGSLAM: Real-Time Dense Reconstruction and Tracking in Endoscopic Surgeries using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15124/) (2024)
- [EndoGaussian: Real-time Gaussian Splatting for Dynamic Endoscopic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12561/) (2024)
- [Gaussian Pancakes: Geometrically-Regularized 3D Gaussian Splatting for Realistic Endoscopic Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06128/) (2024)
- [EndoSparse: Real-Time Sparse View Synthesis of Endoscopic Scenes using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01029/) (2024)
- [C3VDv2 -- Colonoscopy 3D video dataset with enhanced realism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24074/) (2025)
- [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)
- [AnyDepth: Depth Estimation Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02760/) (2026)
- [PR-ENDO: Physically Based Relightable Gaussian Splatting for Endoscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12510/) (2024)
- [NFL-BA: Near-Field Light Bundle Adjustment for SLAM in Dynamic Lighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13176/) (2024)
- [ColonCrafter: A Depth Estimation Model for Colonoscopy Videos Using Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13525/) (2025)
- [Endo-4DGX: Robust Endoscopic Scene Reconstruction and Illumination Correction with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23308/) (2025)
- [EndoPBR: Material and Lighting Estimation for Photorealistic Surgical Simulations via Physically-based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20669/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [C3VD-DEFCOL: A Deformable Colonoscopy Dataset with Time-Resolved 3D Ground Truth and Realistic Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07891/) (2026)
- [Lesion-centered 3D mapping of colonoscopy procedures: validation of a hierarchical ensemble pipeline on public benchmark videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16672/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate 3D reconstruction of colonoscopy data, accounting for complex peristaltic movements, is crucial for advanced surgical navigation and retrospective diagnostics. While recent novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction methods have demonstrated remarkable success in general endoscopic scenarios, they struggle in the highly constrained environment of the colon. Due to the limited field of view of a camera moving through an actively deforming tubular structure, existing endoscopic methods reconstruct the colon appearance only for initial camera trajectory. However, the underlying anatomy remains largely static; instead of updating Gaussians' spatial coordinates (xyz), these methods encode deformation through either rotation, scale or opacity adjustments. In this paper, we first present a benchmark analysis of state-of-the-art dynamic endoscopic methods for realistic colonoscopic scenes, showing that they fail to model true anatomical motion. To enable rigorous evaluation of global reconstruction quality, we introduce DynamicColon, a synthetic dataset with ground-truth point clouds at every timestep. Building on these insights, we propose ColonSplat, a dynamic Gaussian Splatting framework that captures peristaltic-like motion while preserving global geometric consistency, achieving superior geometric fidelity on C3VDv2 and DynamicColon datasets. Project page: https://wmito.github.io/ColonSplat