Point Tracking in Surgery--The 2024 Surgical Tattoos in Infrared (STIR) Challenge

Understanding tissue motion in surgery is crucial to enable applications in downstream tasks such as segmentation, 3D reconstruction, virtual tissue landmarking, autonomous probe-based scanning, and subtask autonomy. Labeled data are essential to enabling algorithms in these downstream tasks since they allow us to quantify and train algorithms. This paper introduces a point tracking challenge to address this, wherein participants can submit their algorithms for quantification. The submitted algorithms are evaluated using a dataset named surgical tattoos in infrared (STIR), with the challenge aptly named the STIR Challenge 2024. The STIR Challenge 2024 comprises two quantitative components: accuracy and efficiency. The accuracy component tests the accuracy of algorithms on in vivo and ex vivo sequences. The efficiency component tests the latency of algorithm inference. The challenge was conducted as a part of MICCAI EndoVis 2024. In this challenge, we had 8 total teams, with 4 teams submitting before and 4 submitting after challenge day. This paper details the STIR Challenge 2024, which serves to move the field towards more accurate and efficient algorithms for spatial understanding in surgery. In this paper we summarize the design, submissions, and results from the challenge. The challenge dataset is available here: https://zenodo.org/records/14803158 , and the code for baseline models and metric calculation is available here: https://github.com/athaddius/STIRMetrics

Multi-Dimensional AGV Path Planning in 3D Warehouses Using Ant Colony Optimization and Advanced Neural Networks

Within modern warehouse scenarios, the rapid expansion of e-commerce and increasingly complex, multi-level storage environments have exposed the limitations of traditional AGV (Automated Guided Vehicle) path planning methods--often reliant on static 2D models and expert-tuned heuristics that struggle to handle dynamic traffic and congestion. Addressing these limitations, this paper introduces a novel AGV path planning approach for 3D warehouse environments that leverages a hybrid framework combining ACO (Ant Colony Optimization) with deep learning models, called NAHACO (Neural Adaptive Heuristic Ant Colony Optimization). NAHACO integrates three key innovations: first, an innovative heuristic algorithm for 3D warehouse cargo modeling using multidimensional tensors, which addresses the challenge of achieving superior heuristic accuracy; second, integration of a congestion-aware loss function within the ACO framework to adjust path costs based on traffic and capacity constraints, called CARL (Congestion-Aware Reinforce Loss), enabling dynamic heuristic calibration for optimizing ACO-based path planning; and third, an adaptive attention mechanism that captures multi-scale spatial features, thereby addressing dynamic heuristic calibration for further optimization of ACO-based path planning and AGV navigation. NAHACO significantly boosts path planning efficiency, yielding faster computation times and superior performance over both vanilla and state-of-the-art methods, while automatically adapting to warehouse constraints for real-time optimization. NAHACO outperforms state-of-the-art methods, lowering the total cost by up to 24.7% on TSP benchmarks. In warehouse tests, NAHACO cuts cost by up to 41.5% and congestion by up to 56.1% compared to previous methods.