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BackgroundSurgical interfaces are used for helping surgeons in interpretation and quantification of the patient information, and for the presentation of an integrated workflow where all available data are combined to enable optimal treatments. Human factors research provides a systematic approach to design user interfaces with safety, accuracy, satisfaction and comfort. One of the human factors research called user-centered design approach is used to develop a surgical interface for kidney tumor cryoablation. An eye tracking device is used to obtain the best configuration of the developed surgical interface.MethodsSurgical interface for kidney tumor cryoablation has been developed considering the four phases of user-centered design approach, which are analysis, design, implementation and deployment. Possible configurations of the surgical interface, which comprise various combinations of menu-based command controls, visual display of multi-modal medical images, 2D and 3D models of the surgical environment, graphical or tabulated information, visual alerts, etc., has been developed. Experiments of a simulated cryoablation of a tumor task have been performed with surgeons to evaluate the proposed surgical interface. Fixation durations and number of fixations at informative regions of the surgical interface have been analyzed, and these data are used to modify the surgical interface.ResultsEye movement data has shown that participants concentrated their attention on informative regions more when the number of displayed Computer Tomography (CT) images has been reduced. Additionally, the time required to complete the kidney tumor cryoablation task by the participants had been decreased with the reduced number of CT images. Furthermore, the fixation durations obtained after the revision of the surgical interface are very close to what is observed in visual search and natural scene perception studies suggesting more efficient and comfortable interaction with the surgical interface. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) and Short Post-Assessment Situational Awareness (SPASA) questionnaire results have shown that overall mental workload of surgeons related with surgical interface has been low as it has been aimed, and overall situational awareness scores of surgeons have been considerably high.ConclusionsThis preliminary study highlights the improvement of a developed surgical interface using eye tracking technology to obtain the best SI configuration. The results presented here reveal that visual surgical interface design prepared according to eye movement characteristics may lead to improved usability.

In this study, an exoskeleton type robot-assisted rehabilitation system, called RehabRoby, is developed for rehabilitation purposes. A control architecture, which contains a high-level controller and a low-level controller, is designed so that RehabRoby can complete the given rehabilitation task in a desired and safe manner. A hybrid system modelling technique is used for the high-level controller. An admittance control with an inner robust position control loop is used for the low-level control of the RehabRoby. Real-time experiments are performed to evaluate the control architecture of the robot-assisted rehabilitation system, RehabRoby. Furthermore, the usability of RehabRoby is evaluated.

A finger exoskeleton has been developed to aid treatment of tendon injuries. The exoskeleton is designed to assist flexion/extension motions of a finger within its full range, in a natural and coordinated manner, while keeping the tendon tension within acceptable limits to avoid gap formation or rupture of the suture. In addition to offering robot assisted operation modes for tendon therapies, the exoskeleton can provide quantitative measures of recovery that can help guide the physical therapy program. Usability studies have been conducted and efficacy of exoskeleton driven exercises to reduce muscle requitement levels has been demonstrated.

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The experiments performed on the OrthoRoby robotic system and its intelligent control architecture yielded promising results. Although minor problems still exist at the prototype stage, minor modifications of the OrthoRoby and intelligent control architecture would be a significant step towards the use of the OrthoRoby and its intelligent control architecture in a surgical operation.

The introduction of robotic surgery within the operating rooms has significantly improved the quality of many surgical procedures. Recently, the research on medical robotic systems focused on increasing the level of autonomy in order to give them the possibility to carry out simple surgical actions autonomously. This paper reports on the development of technologies for introducing automation within the surgical workflow. The results have been obtained during the ongoing FP7 European funded project Intelligent Surgical Robotics (I-SUR). The main goal of the project is to demonstrate that autonomous robotic surgical systems can carry out simple surgical tasks effectively and without major intervention by surgeons. To fulfil this goal, we have developed innovative solutions (both in terms of technologies and algorithms) for the following aspects: fabrication of soft organ models starting from CT images, surgical planning and execution of movement of robot arms in contact with a deformable environment, designing a surgical interface minimizing the cognitive load of the surgeon supervising the actions, intra-operative sensing and reasoning to detect normal transitions and unexpected events. All these technologies have been integrated using a component-based software architecture to control a novel robot designed to perform the surgical actions under study. In this work we provide an overview of our system and report on preliminary results of the automatic execution of needle insertion for the cryoablation of kidney tumours.

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