Abstract-Every surgical item used during surgery (e.g., sponges) must be accounted for after surgery to ensure that none of these items is left inside the patient. Despite the numerous precautions in place, in approximately 1 in 1500 cases, something gets left behind inside the patient's body. This paper presents ASSIST, an automated system for surgical instrument and sponge tracking that increases the safety of surgical procedures. ASSIST utilizes RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology to aid in accounting for all items used during surgery. The design takes into account safety, simplicity, ease of deployment, and ease of use. An initial evaluation utilizing RFID-tagged sponges demonstrates that ASSIST can reliably track surgical sponges with minimal impact to current operating room procedures. Sources of error that can impact the reliability of the system are also discussed.
Abstract-We present our work on developing and testing the high-level control for a future tele-robotic system for minimally invasive surgery of the throat and upper airways. As a testbed for these experiments, we used a hybrid 8 Degrees-ofFreedom (DoF) experimental robot composed of a six DoF robot and a two DoF snake-like unit. The kinematics and weighted redundancy resolution to support suturing in confined spaces, such as the throat, is developed and experimental validation in presented. The kinematics of the hybrid system is described in an 8-dimensional augmented vector space composed from the joint variables of the six DoF robot and two angles describing the configuration of the snake-like unit. Then a weighted, multi objective, optimization framework is used to perform the suturing operation under the assumption of a predefined suture geometry while satisfying joint limits, torque constraints, and minimizing extraneous motions of the system joints.
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