Visual-based autonomous field of view control of laparoscope with safety-RCM constraints for semi-autonomous surgery

A Parallel Robot With Remote Centre-of-Motion for Eye Surgery: Design, Kinematics, Prototype, and Experiments

BACKGROUND

Millions of patients suffering from eye disease cannot receive proper treatment due to the lack of qualified surgeons. Medical robots have the potential to solve this problem and have attracted significant attention in the research community.

METHOD

This paper proposes a novel parallel robot with a remote centre of motion for minimally invasive eye surgery. Kinematics models, singularity and workspace analyses, and dimension optimisation are conducted. A prototype was developed, and experiments were conducted to test its mobility, accuracy, precision and stiffness.

RESULTS

The prototype robot can successfully perform the required motions, and has a precision ranging from 7 ± 2 μm to 30 ± 8 μm, accuracy from 21 ± 10 μm to 568 ± 374 μm, and stiffness ranging from 1.22 ± 0.39 N/mm to 10.53 ± 5.18 N/mm.

CONCLUSION

The prototype robot has a great potential for performing the minimally invasive surgery. Its stiffness meets the design requirement, but its accuracy and precision need to be further improved.

A Novel Perception Framework for Automatic Laparoscope Zoom Factor Control Using Tool Geometry

In conventional Minimally Invasive Surgery, the surgeon conducts the operation while a human or robot holds the laparoscope. Laparoscope control is returned to the surgeon in teleoperated camera holding robots, but simultaneously controlling the laparoscope and surgical tools might be cognitively demanding. On the other hand, fully automated camera holders are still limited in their performance. To help the surgeon to better focus on the main operation while maintaining their control authority, we propose an automatic laparoscope zoom factor control framework for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery. In this paper, we present the perception section of the framework. It extracts and uses the surgical tool's geometric characteristics to adjust the laparoscope's zoom factor, without any artificial markers. The acceptable range and tooltip's position frequency during operations are analysed based on the gallbladder removal surgery dataset (Cholec80). The common range and tooltip's heatmap are identified and presented quantitatively.