Force sensing and its application in minimally invasive surgery and therapy: A survey

Abstract

The reduced access conditions of minimally invasive surgery and therapy (MIST) impair or completely eliminate the feel of tool—tissue interaction forces. Many researchers have been working actively on the development of force sensors and sensing techniques to address this problem. The goal of this survey article is to summarize the state of the art in force sensing techniques for medical interventions in order to identify existing limitations and future directions. A literature search was performed from January to July 2009 using a combination of keywords relevant to the area, including force, sensor, sensing, haptics, and minimally invasive surgery. The literature search resulted in 126 articles with valuable content. This article presents a summary of the force sensing technologies, design specifications for force sensors in clinical applications, force sensors and sensing instruments that have been developed for MIST, and the experiments performed to determine the need for force information. Open areas of research include force sensor design, development of alternative methods of sensing, assessment of the impact of force information on performance, determination of the benefits of haptic information, and evaluation of the human factors involved in the processing and use of force information.

Intraoperative forces and moments analysis on patient head clamp during awake brain surgery

“…The design and implementation of force/moment sensors to be used during surgical interventions had to fulfill the operating workspace constraints, electrical safety, sterilization and biocompatibility [16,22] issues. Forces and moments were estimated after a calibration procedure.…”

“…Among the possible technologies for six axes forcemoment sensors design (e.g., piezoresistive, piezoelectric, capacitive etc. [3,12,22]), SGs allow for easy customization, guarantee wide design possibilities and are costeffective.…”

Haptics in Robot-Assisted Surgery: Challenges and Benefits

“…The most common method of sterilization is applying saturated steam on the instruments for a duration of about 15 minutes [74]. Therefore, the sensors must be robust to heat, pressure and humidity.…”

“…However, limited flexibility of some optical fibers and sensitivity to changes in light intensity caused by tilting of the optical cables or misalignment limits their use. Trejos et al [74] summarized the MIS force sensing methods available in the literature until July 2009. Recent works on miniature force sensor for Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RMIS) applications have proposed innovative designs to achieve structural simplicity and potential cost effectiveness.…”

Investigation and experimental measurement of scissor blade cutting forces using fiber Bragg grating sensors

“…One approach to overcoming this problem is the placement of strain/force sensing transducers either onto the instrument tip or as close as possible to it. Many research groups have indicated that the ideal location for force sensor placement is as close as possible to the site of interaction [2,[8][9][10][11][12], which for MIRS is at the instrument tip. This is technically the most challenging location for placement of a force transducer owing to space limitations.…”