Tactile Perception Technologies and Their Applications in Minimally Invasive Surgery: A Review.

Chao Huang,Mingfu Zhao,Sinuo Pan,Minjie Yuan,Chunyan Chen,Qizhuo Wang

doi:10.3389/fphys.2020.611596

Abstract

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has been the preferred surgery approach owing to its advantages over conventional open surgery. As a major limitation, the lack of tactile perception impairs the ability of surgeons in tissue distinction and maneuvers. Many studies have been reported on industrial robots to perceive various tactile information. However, only force data are widely used to restore part of the surgeon’s sense of touch in MIS. In recent years, inspired by image classification technologies in computer vision, tactile data are represented as images, where a tactile element is treated as an image pixel. Processing raw data or features extracted from tactile images with artificial intelligence (AI) methods, including clustering, support vector machine (SVM), and deep learning, has been proven as effective methods in industrial robotic tactile perception tasks. This holds great promise for utilizing more tactile information in MIS. This review aims to provide potential tactile perception methods for MIS by reviewing literatures on tactile sensing in MIS and literatures on industrial robotic tactile perception technologies, especially AI methods on tactile images.

Highlights

Invasive surgery (MIS) is a surgery approach that provides indirect access to anatomy for surgeons by introducing specially designed surgical instruments or flexible catheters into a patient’s body through minimally sized incisions (Verdura et al, 2000)
To support the multiple cases in the above paragraphs, we investigated the necessity of force feedback in minimally invasive surgery, which was proved and explained in (Morimoto et al, 1997) and (Tholey et al, 2005)
Invasive surgery has been the preferred surgery approach owing to its advantages over conventional open surgery

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Invasive surgery (MIS) is a surgery approach that provides indirect access to anatomy for surgeons by introducing specially designed surgical instruments or flexible catheters into a patient’s body through minimally sized incisions (Verdura et al, 2000). In (Kim et al, 2015), a type of surgical instrument with force sensors of 4 DOFs was developed, which could be applied to measure the normal force and the tangential force from the tip of the tools by capacitive transduction principle Another conspicuous application scenario of force feedback in minimally invasive surgery is palpation. The force feedback provides better tumor localization performance and more precise suture and incision operation with straightforward quantitative measures, it can be somehow time consuming since the measurement from one point to another is low effective in the algorithm level as shown in (Talasaz and Patel, 2013) Apart from this problem, another problem from the force feedback method is the attenuation of the force signal since the surgical tools are always long and stiff.

Literature

Findings

CONCLUSION