Evaluation of a telerobotic system to assist surgeons in microsurgery

Abstract

A tool was developed that assists surgeons in manipulating surgical instruments more precisely than is possible manually. The tool is a telemanipulator that scales down the surgeon's hand motion and filters tremor in the motion. The signals measured from the surgeon's hand are transformed and used to drive a six-degrees-of-freedom robot to position the surgical instrument mounted on its tip. A pilot study comparing the performance of the telemanipulator system against manual instrument positioning was conducted at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. The results show that a telerobotic tool can improve the performance of a microsurgeon by increasing the precision with which he can position surgical instruments, but this is achieved at the cost of increased time in performing the task. We believe that this technology will extend the capabilities of microsurgeons and allow more surgeons to perform highly skilled procedures currently performed only by the best surgeons. It will also enable performance of new surgical procedures that are beyond the capabilities of even the most skilled surgeons.

Applied force during vitreoretinal microsurgery with handheld instruments

“…Methods to overcome the limits of manual positioning accuracy have been the subject of several investigations in recent years, leading to the development of a variety of different types of accuracy-enhancement systems [2][3][4]. Some of these systems may enable new types of microsurgical procedures in the near future.…”

“…Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference of the IEEE EMBS San Francisco, CA, USA • September [1][2][3][4][5]2004 …”

State estimation and feedforward tremor suppression for a handheld micromanipulator with a Kalman filter

“…Advanced robotics technology such as the Johns Hopkins SteadyHand [3] aid surgeons by suppressing tremor with mechanical damping, providing a smoother, more accurate manipulation experience. Master/slave configurations such as the Robot Assisted MicroSurgery (RAMS) [4] or the robot-assisted vitreoretinal surgery system [5] depend on running tremor compensation filters between the haptic input and the output tip. Micron, the micromanipulator built in our lab, is a fully handheld micromanipulator with actuators between the handle and the tip of the instrument [6].…”

Fuzzy Calibration of Magnetometer in Presence of Surgical Microscope

“…UPPRESSION of physiological tremor for enhanced accuracy during microsurgery has been the subject of several research efforts in recent years [1][2][3]. One such effort has been the development of Micron, a fully handheld active micromanipulator [4].…”