Automated Pick-Up of Suturing Needles for Robotic Surgical Assistance

Abstract

Robot-assisted laparoscopic prostatectomy (RALP) is a treatment for prostate cancer that involves complete or nerve sparing removal prostate tissue that contains cancer. After removal the bladder neck is successively sutured directly with the urethra. The procedure is called urethrovesical anastomosis and is one of the most dexterity demanding tasks during RALP. Two suturing instruments and a pair of needles are used in combination to perform a running stitch during urethrovesical anastomosis. While robotic instruments provide enhanced dexterity to perform the anastomosis, it is still highly challenging and difficult to learn. In this paper, we presents a vision-guided needle grasping method for automatically grasping the needle that has been inserted into the patient prior to anastomosis. We aim to automatically grasp the suturing needle in a position that avoids hand-offs and immediately enables the start of suturing. The full grasping process can be broken down into: a needle detection algorithm; an approach phase where the surgical tool moves closer to the needle based on visual feedback; and a grasping phase through path planning based on observed surgical practice. Our experimental results show examples of successful autonomous grasping that has the potential to simplify and decrease the operational time in RALP by assisting a small component of urethrovesical anastomosis.

Autonomous Pick-and-Place of Pneumatically Attachable Flexible Rails

“…The stereo endoscope is calibrated using conventional camera calibration [2]. For the transformation between the camera and robot frame, we select a specific point cloud and, knowing the coordinate of points in the different reference frames, the calibration problem can be formulated as a point cloud registration problem [3]. The proposed system presents a visual interface which allows the surgeon to select the current position of the PAF rail and the location where it should be placed on the organ's surface.…”

Autonomous Tissue Retraction in Robotic Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery – A Feasibility Study

“…The research on task autonomy aims at relieving the surgeon of manual and repetitive tasks in a collaborative framework, rather than substituting the human action completely [12], [13]. Research in autonomous suturing and related sub-tasks, discussed in [14], [15] has been greatly facilitated by the availability of datasets dedicated to the analysis and automation of surgical gestures (JIGSAWS [16]). The use of automation for 3D tissue debridement of soft tissues presented in [17] is particularly interesting.…”

Haptic-guided shared control for needle grasping optimization in minimally invasive robotic surgery

“…are shown in Table I, while PSM joint limits are given in Table II. The needle pose estimation follows the work in [6] (see Fig. 1c).…”

“…In the robotic surgery domain, D'Ettorre et al proposed in [6] a vision-guided method for autonomous needle grasping which allows the surgeon to immediately start suturing. Nevertheless, the authors only focused on planning the success of g 0 and g 1 .…”