# Multi-modal Representation Fusion for Long-term Microsurgical Anastomosis Trajectory Anticipation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14492 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14492/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Implicit Behavioral Cloning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00137/) (2021)
- [YOLOv12: Attention-Centric Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12524/) (2025)
- [Learning to Estimate Hidden Motions with Global Motion Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02409/) (2021)
- [TeCNO: Surgical Phase Recognition with Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10751/) (2020)
- [Leapfrog Diffusion Model for Stochastic Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10895/) (2023)
- [Is Mamba Effective for Time Series Forecasting?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11144/) (2024)
- [Joint Hand Motion and Interaction Hotspots Prediction from Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01696/) (2022)
- [SurgicalSAM: Efficient Class Promptable Surgical Instrument Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08746/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Monocular Depth and Ego-Motion Estimation in Endoscopy: Appearance Flow to the Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08122/) (2021)
- [Pixel-Wise Recognition for Holistic Surgical Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11174/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-aware State Space Transformer for Egocentric 3D Hand Trajectory Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08243/) (2023)
- [MIcro-Surgical Anastomose Workflow recognition challenge report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13111/) (2021)
- [Text Promptable Surgical Instrument Segmentation with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09244/) (2023)
- [SRT-H: A Hierarchical Framework for Autonomous Surgery via Language Conditioned Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10251/) (2025)
- [MADiff: Motion-Aware Mamba Diffusion Models for Hand Trajectory Prediction on Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02638/) (2024)
- [SurgSora: Object-Aware Diffusion Model for Controllable Surgical Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14018/) (2024)
- [Recognition and Prediction of Surgical Gestures and Trajectories Using Transformer Models in Robot-Assisted Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01683/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Transformers for Real-Time Surgical Activity Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06705/) (2024)
- [Novel Diffusion Models for Multimodal 3D Hand Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07375/) (2025)
- [HieraSurg: Hierarchy-Aware Diffusion Model for Surgical Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21287/) (2025)
- [SutureBot: A Precision Framework & Benchmark For Autonomous End-to-End Suturing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20965/) (2025)
- [SurgMLLMBench: A Multimodal Large Language Model Benchmark Dataset for Surgical Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21339/) (2025)
- [Learning dissection trajectories from expert surgical videos via imitation learning with equivariant diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04716/) (2025)
- [EggHand: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Egocentric Hand Pose Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07642/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Microsurgical anastomosis is one of the most challenging and sophisticated procedures for surgical robotics, requiring accurate manipulation of surgical instruments within a limited space to achieve precise operations. Accurate surgical trajectory anticipation is essential for surgical scene understanding, intraoperative planning, robotic manipulation, and reliable behaviour analysis. However, existing approaches mainly focus on features extracted from surgical videos and historical trajectories, while overlooking rich semantic and motion information that can provide more discriminative multi-modal representations for complex surgical instrument-tissue interactions. In this work, we propose a cross-modal feature fusion framework for long-term 2D and 3D microsurgical anastomosis trajectory anticipation. The proposed framework consists of a multi-modal representation extractor and a cross-modal feature fusion network. Semantic recognition of surgical objects and consecutive motion estimation are incorporated as multi-modal visual cues, providing complementary spatial and temporal guidance for instrument-tissue interaction characterization. A coarse-to-fine progressive fusion strategy with a long-short-term memory mechanism is introduced to capture temporal dependencies step by step. The training and evaluation are conducted on our established robotic platform and a comprehensive dataset containing both phantom and ex-vivo surgical scenarios is constructed. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms existing methods and exhibits improved robustness across different surgical scenes, highlighting its potential for both intelligent robot-assisted and autonomous surgical systems.