A microsurgical robot research platform for robot-assisted microsurgery research and training

Dandan Zhang,Daniel Bautista Salinas,Guang-Zhong Yang,Wei Li,Junhong Chen

doi:10.1007/s11548-019-02074-1

Dandan Zhang, Daniel Bautista Salinas + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-019-02074-1

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Abstract

PurposeOcular surgery, ear, nose and throat surgery and neurosurgery are typical types of microsurgery. A versatile training platform can assist microsurgical skills development and accelerate the uptake of robot-assisted microsurgery (RAMS). However, the currently available platforms are mainly designed for macro-scale minimally invasive surgery. There is a need to develop a dedicated microsurgical robot research platform for both research and clinical training.MethodsA microsurgical robot research platform (MRRP) is introduced in this paper. The hardware system includes a slave robot with bimanual manipulators, two master controllers and a vision system. It is flexible to support multiple microsurgical tools. The software architecture is developed based on the robot operating system, which is extensible at high-level control. The selection of master–slave mapping strategy was explored, while comparisons were made between different interfaces.ResultsExperimental verification was conducted based on two microsurgical tasks for training evaluation, i.e. trajectory following and targeting. User study results indicated that the proposed hybrid interface is more effective than the traditional approach in terms of frequency of clutching, task completion time and ease of control.ConclusionResults indicated that the MRRP can be utilized for microsurgical skills training, since motion kinematic data and vision data can provide objective means of verification and scoring. The proposed system can further be used for verifying high-level control algorithms and task automation for RAMS research.

Highlights

Microsurgery encompasses ophthalmic, ENT, brain surgeries and other surgical tasks involving microscale precisions
Since all the subjects completed repetitions of the two control interfaces, the user studies are within-subject design, where Wilcoxon signed-rank tests are applied for nonparametric statistical comparison between variables, while T tests are used for the other evaluation metrics
The slave robot of microsurgical robot research platform (MRRP) is developed based on a 6-DoF hexapod positioning stage, while Phantom Omni and an in-house hand-held master controller are used as the grounded and ungrounded master manipulators of the control console, respectively

Summary

Introduction

Microsurgery encompasses ophthalmic, ENT, brain surgeries and other surgical tasks involving microscale precisions. Microsurgical procedures require operating field magnification through a microscope to allow for delicate tissue. The main challenge for microsurgery is being able to perform tasks beyond the level of human perception and dexterity [1]. Despite the clinical success of systems such as the da Vinci system (Intuitive Surgical, Inc., USA) [5], the current platforms are not catered for complex microsurgical tasks. The JPL RAMS Workstation has six serial revolute joints [6] It could not hold and operate a microsurgical needle, since it can only be used as a supportive platform for microsurgery.

Results

Discussion

Conclusion