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    "headline": "Depth Found the Contact That Color Couldn’t Transfer",
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    "dek": "A stereo-distance signal held a 0.927 macro F1 across new surgical tasks and phantoms while an RGB baseline fell to 0.320.",
    "summary": "A stereo-distance signal held a 0.927 macro F1 across new surgical tasks and phantoms while an RGB baseline fell to 0.320.",
    "body_text": "The detector reduces stereo depth around a surgical tool boundary to one distance-derived scalar and models contact as a two-state process. Trained on six palpation sessions and tested on four held-out sessions, it reached 0.927 macro F1 and 0.980 AUPRC across same- and cross-phantom settings. The comparison uses silicone phantoms, so the study supports a transferable cue rather than clinical performance in living tissue.",
    "why_it_matters": "A stereo-distance signal held a 0.927 macro F1 across new surgical tasks and phantoms while an RGB baseline fell to 0.320.",
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    "tags": [
      "robot-assisted surgery",
      "stereo depth",
      "contact detection"
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    "corrections": []
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    {
      "source_id": "source-2026-08-20-006",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2608.18270",
      "publisher": "arXiv",
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      "published_at": "2026-08-17T20:00:00.000-04:00",
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    "title": "Depth Found the Contact That Color Couldn’t Transfer",
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