Motion-Guided Dual-Camera Tracker for Low-Cost Skill Evaluation of Gastric Endoscopy

Gastric simulators with objective educational feedback have been proven useful for endoscopy training. Existing electronic simulators with feedback are however not commonly adopted due to their high cost. In this work, a motion-guided dual-camera tracker is proposed to provide reliable endoscope tip position feedback at a low cost inside a mechanical simulator for endoscopy skill evaluation, tackling several unique challenges. To address the issue of significant appearance variation of the endoscope tip while keeping dual-camera tracking consistency, the cross-camera mutual template strategy (CMT) is proposed to introduce dynamic transient mutual templates to dual-camera tracking. To alleviate disturbance from large occlusion and distortion by the light source from the endoscope tip, the Mamba-based motion-guided prediction head (MMH) is presented to aggregate visual tracking with historical motion information modeled by the state space model. The proposed tracker was evaluated on datasets captured by low-cost camera pairs during endoscopy procedures performed inside the mechanical simulator. The tracker achieves SOTA performance with robust and consistent tracking on dual cameras. Further downstream evaluation proves that the 3D tip position determined by the proposed tracker enables reliable skill differentiation. The code and dataset will be released upon acceptance.

A Unified Framework for Microscopy Defocus Deblur with Multi-Pyramid Transformer and Contrastive Learning

Defocus blur is a persistent problem in microscope imaging that poses harm to pathology interpretation and medical intervention in cell microscopy and microscope surgery. To address this problem, a unified framework including multi-pyramid transformer (MPT) and extended frequency contrastive regularization (EFCR) is proposed to tackle two outstanding challenges in microscopy deblur: longer attention span and feature deficiency. The MPT employs an explicit pyramid structure at each network stage that integrates the cross-scale window attention (CSWA), the intra-scale channel attention (ISCA), and the feature-enhancing feed-forward network (FEFN) to capture long-range cross-scale spatial interaction and global channel context. The EFCR addresses the feature deficiency problem by exploring latent deblur signals from different frequency bands. It also enables deblur knowledge transfer to learn cross-domain information from extra data, improving deblur performance for labeled and unlabeled data. Extensive experiments and downstream task validation show the framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple datasets. Project page: https://github.com/PieceZhang/MPT-CataBlur.