Abstract
Force sensing in robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) is crucial for performing dedicated surgical procedures, such as bilateral teleoperation and palpation. Due to the bio-compatibility and sterilization requirements, a specially designed surgical tool/shaft is normally attached to the sensor while contacting the organ targets. Through this design, the measured force from the sensor usually contains uncertainties, such as noise, inertial force etc., and thus cannot reflect the actual interaction force with the tissue environment. Motivated to provide the authentic contact force between a robotic tool and soft tissue, we proposed a data-driven force compensation scheme without intricate modeling to reduce the effects of force measurement uncertainties. In this paper, a neural-network-based approach is utilized to automatically model the inertial force subject to noise during the robotic palpation procedure, then the exact contact force can be obtained through the force compensation method which cancels the noise and inertial force. Following this approach, the genuine interaction force during the palpation task can be achieved furthermore to improve the appraisal of the tumor surrounded by the soft tissue. Experiments are conducted with robotic-assisted palpation tasks on a silicone-based soft tissue phantom and the results verify the effectiveness of the suggested method.
Highlights
The robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) has been introduced into the operating room with significant advantages such as improved accuracy, intuitive manipulation, small/invisible incisions and enhanced visualizations etc., as can be witnessed in quite a number of literatures [1,2,3,4]
We investigate the effect of inertial force for robotic palpation with a probe on the force sensor, a neural-network-based method is utilized to model the inertial force during the palpation, and after that the inertial force will be compensated in an online way during the data collection process
To deal with the uncertainties exist in the force sensor measurement, free motion experiments are performed, the free motion experiments mean that the robot is moving along the Z axis but without contacting any objects, in which the probe does not contact any object, and the robot is moving while performing the palpation task along the Z axis
Summary
The robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) has been introduced into the operating room with significant advantages such as improved accuracy, intuitive manipulation, small/invisible incisions and enhanced visualizations etc., as can be witnessed in quite a number of literatures [1,2,3,4]. It can be found that after the inertial force compensation, the calculated stiffness of the soft tissue is improved to better describe the real mechanical property of the soft tissue during dynamic robotic palpation tasks.
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