Development of a Cognitive Robotic System for Simple Surgical Tasks

Abstract

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.

A Cognitive Robot Control Architecture for Autonomous Execution of Surgical Tasks

“…This paper extends the analysis and implementation of these surgical tasks described in preliminary works [26,27]. The proposed control system is able to adapt online the interaction between the robot and the environment and to switch from autonomous to teleoperated mode preserving stability.…”

“…Clinical effectiveness of the emulated cryoablation experiment is related to the correct implementation of the supervision and control systems, which is the focus of this paper, but also to the accurate registration and calibration of the robotic setup. The detailed explanation of the methods used for the latter operation has been published by Muradore et al [27]. The overall accuracy of the needle tip positioning with respect to the tumor, verified during system testing, was 5.4 mm.…”

“…The surgical tool is mounted on a 6-DOF force/torque sensor (ATI Mini40, ATI Industrial Automation) with a resolution of 0.01 N/0.00025 Nm for control and monitoring purposes. Further details about the mechanical system, designed by the RELab of ETH Zürich (partner of the I-SUR project), are described by Muradore et al [27]. -A phantom accurately reproducing a human abdomen, manufactured at the Centre for Biorobotics of Tallinn University of Technology (another partner of the I-SUR project), that is shown as a red box in Fig.…”

Evaluation of a surgical interface for robotic cryoablation task using an eye-tracking system

“…In this paper we seek the optimum arrangement of a surgical interface (SI), which is being designed for a FP7 European project titled Intelligent Surgical Robotics (I-SUR), using an eye-tracking system. The main goal of the I-SUR project is to demonstrate an autonomous robotic surgical system that can carry out a simple puncturing task, and in particular on the needle insertion for the cryoablation procedure of kidney tumors (Muradore et al, 2015). To achieve this the team members developed kidney phantoms, a robotic system, planners for the robotic system movements, and the current SI that supervises surgical actions, demonstrates the surgical task execution to the surgeon, and provides solutions to the surgeon when unexpected situations occur.…”

A Review of Robotics in Neurorehabilitation: Towards an Automated Process for Upper Limb

“…The development of autonomous systems is an active line in robotics in general, and with increasing presence in healthcare applications, it is already generating beneficial results as it has done in industry [ 49 ]. That is the case of surgical robots in minimally invasive procedures for executing autonomously simple surgical tasks, based on the accuracy of robot movements, image processing algorithms, and cognitive systems.…”