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DART: Depth-as-Target Pretraining for Surgical Vision Foundation Models

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 3, 2026 · UTC

Vision foundation models (VFMs) are valuable in data-scarce domains such as surgery, where a single pretrained backbone can provide rich representations for many downstream tasks. Yet the dominant self-supervised pretraining paradigm uses only RGB images, leaving readily available complementary signals, such as depth maps, unused. This is a particular missed opportunity in surgery, where natural-image VFMs transfer poorly while the scene geometry is rich and informative. With strong off-the-shelf models now able to produce pseudo-labeled dense depth for any image corpus, we hypothesize that su

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