Sensory augmented vascular surgery

Abstract

In conventional invasive or minimally invasive surgical procedures involving blood vessels, the surgeon does not receive any real-time indication or feedback of tissue properties when operating on a vessel. In the widely used coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) procedure, the vessel harve and transplantation may result in trauma to the vessel wall and the endothelium, resulting in an eventual early failure of the graft. To minimize such trauma and to study the interaction of surgical tools with the vessel structure, we have developed a novel approach to instrument the relevant surgical appliances with force sensors and provide tissue property feedback to the surgeon through a haptic feedback device. To better understand the deformation of soft vessel imposed by the surgical appliance and to provide an additional guidance to the surgeon, we have implemented a real-time visual feedback through a computer model of the vessel. The proposed method can also be applicable to other surgeries, such as minimally invasive surgery, telesurgery, as well as the surgical training of the surgery students.