Development of a Haptic Interface for Natural Orifice Translumenal Endoscopic Surgery Simulation

Abstract

Natural orifice translumenal endoscopic surgery (NOTES) is a minimally invasive procedure, which utilizes the body’s natural orifices to gain access to the peritoneal cavity. The NOTES procedure is designed to minimize external scarring and patient trauma, however flexible endoscopy based pure NOTES procedures require critical scope handling skills. The delicate nature of the NOTES procedure requires extensive training, thus to improve access to training while reducing risk to patients we have designed and developed the VTEST©, a virtual reality NOTES simulator. As part of the simulator, a novel decoupled 2-DOF haptic device was developed to provide realistic force feedback to the user in training. A series of experiments were performed to determine the behavioral characteristics of the device. The device was found capable of rendering up to 5.62N and 0.190Nm of continuous force and torque in the translational and rotational DOF, respectively. The device possesses 18.1Hz and 5.7Hz of force bandwidth in the translational and rotational DOF, respectively. A feedforward friction compensator was also successfully implemented to minimize the negative impact of friction during the interaction with the device. In this work we have presented the detailed development and evaluation of the haptic device for the VTEST©.

Multisensory Immersive Analytics

“…Coles et al [25] present a thorough survey of the use of haptic devices in medical training applications, giving many examples of commercial and experimental systems, many of them employing immersive technologies. The use of haptics in medical training applications is in continuous development and mostly taskspecific, such as the force-feedback devices developed by Dargar et al [29]. Among other application domains that benefit from such techniques we can cite driver assistance systems [90] and haptic exploration of computational fluids [23].…”