ARTFEED — Contemporary Art Intelligence

PhySe-RPO: AI Model for Surgical Smoke Removal in Video

ai-technology · 2026-05-07

A team of researchers has introduced PhySe-RPO, a diffusion-based system designed to eliminate surgical smoke from intraoperative videos. This model shifts from deterministic restoration to a stochastic policy, allowing for exploration at the trajectory level and updates that do not require a critic through group-relative optimization. It incorporates a physics-informed reward to ensure consistency in illumination and color, alongside a CLIP-based semantic reward for restoring anatomically coherent, smoke-free visuals. This new method overcomes the challenges faced by current learning-based desmoking techniques that depend on limited paired supervision and deterministic processes. The findings are published in a paper available on arXiv (ID: 2603.22844).

Key facts

  • PhySe-RPO is a diffusion restoration framework for surgical smoke removal.
  • It uses Physics- and Semantics-Guided Relative Policy Optimization.
  • The method transforms deterministic restoration into a stochastic policy.
  • A physics-guided reward ensures illumination and color consistency.
  • A CLIP-based semantic reward promotes smoke-free restoration.
  • The approach enables trajectory-level exploration and critic-free updates.
  • Existing methods rely on scarce paired supervision and deterministic pipelines.
  • The paper is available on arXiv with ID 2603.22844.

Entities

Institutions

  • arXiv

Sources