Language-Conditioned Behavioral Cloning for Autonomous Endoscope Guidance
This research paper proposes a language-conditioned behavioral cloning approach to automate endoscope guidance during minimally invasive surgery. The authors define six clinically relevant guidance behaviors and collect 235 subtask demonstrations. Preliminary experiments on phantoms show the policy achieves 100% success on focus, overview, and stop behaviors, 80% on search-tip and follow-tip behaviors, and 50% on horizon leveling. The results indicate feasibility for learning heterogeneous surgeon-requested camera behaviors with a single visuomotor policy, though failure modes suggest future work is needed to incorporate temporal context for more demanding tasks.