A Framework for Predicting Haptic Feedback in Needle Insertion in 5G Remote Robotic Surgery

Abstract

Robots are being used more and more in surgery due to the many benefits they bring (e.g. reduction of patient discomfort, precision, reliability). Remote robotic surgery is now expected to become a reality due to the emergence of 5G. Needle insertion is a crucial element of many robotic surgical procedures such as biopsies, injections, neurosurgery, and brachytherapy cancer treatment. During needle insertion in remote robotic surgery, there is still no guarantee that the surgeon will obtain the haptic feedback from the patient side within the stringent deadlines, even in 5G settings. This paper proposes a framework for learning by imitation as a way to predict the messages that will eventually fail to reach their destination within the required deadlines. By leveraging expert demonstrations, the Hidden Markov Model is used to encapsulate a set of expert force/torque profiles and corresponding parameters during the off-line training process. A Gaussian mixture regression is then used to reproduce a generalized version of the force/torque profile and corresponding parameters during the prediction. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. They show that our proposed framework is able to execute predictions in much less than the 1ms end-to-end latency requirement of remote robotic surgery.