Tactile Augmented Reality for Arteries Palpation in Open Surgery Training

Abstract

Palpation is an essential step of several open surgical procedures for locating arteries by arterial pulse detection. In this context, surgical simulation would ideally provide realistic haptic sensations to the operator. This paper presents a proof of concept implementation of tactile augmented reality for open-surgery training. The system is based on the integration of a wearable tactile device into an augmented physical simulator which allows the real time tracking of artery reproductions and the user finger and provides pulse feedback during palpation. Preliminary qualitative test showed a general consensus among surgeons regarding the realism of the arterial pulse feedback and the usefulness of tactile augmented reality in open-surgery simulators

A Fabric-Based Approach for Wearable Haptics

“…A natural application of wearable systems, given the high level of portability, is virtual and augmented reality, as witnessed for example by results presented in reference [63] for W-FYD. Other important examples can be assistive robotics, e.g., guidance for blind people and force feedback in prosthetics for CUFF, or clinical rehabilitative scenarios, where the possibility to have haptic stimuli conveyed in a controllable and repeatable fashion can be exploited to stimulate ANS-this is the case of caress-like haptic device [77], which can be also used for social interaction through affective cue delivery.…”

“…Without any claim of exhaustiveness, the conclusion that can be drawn is that mechanical change of fabric stress-strain behavior can represent a viable and cost-effective solution for wearable haptics, for both discriminative and affective touch, presenting a high level of portability, with high potential impacts in different application fields. At the same time, fabrics can stimulate skin in a natural fashion, enabling an intuitive cue delivery with minimal effects on haptic perception-this opens up promising avenues in augmented reality, i.e., through the superposition of additional tactile cues during the exploration of real objects, as in reference [63]. Of course, to push forward this paradigm, it is important to further reduce device dimensions and encumbrance, and, at the same time, take into account user's point of view and acceptability.…”

“…In the latter case, W-FYD acts as a display mounted on the user's finger for remote-robotic palpation of soft materials, e.g., in robot-assisted medical applications or surgeon training, where the correct rendering of tissue stiffness, and other haptic cues, is extremely important for the success of diagnostic or surgical procedures. In this regard, it is worth to mention that W-FYD was integrated into an augmented physical simulator that allows the real time tracking of artery reproductions and the user's finger, and provides pulse feedback during palpation [63]. Preliminary experiments showed a general consensus among surgeons regarding the realism of the arterial pulse feedback and the usefulness of tactile augmented reality in open-surgery simulators.…”

Tacttoo

“…Feel-through tactile interfaces enable new applications in the emerging areas of tactile augmented reality [5,10] and skinbased interfaces [64,46,35]. For instance, product designers can explore real tactile features of a physical prototype, while custom interactive feedback is rendered simultaneously on the fingertip.…”

W-FYD: A Wearable Fabric-Based Display for Haptic Multi-Cue Delivery and Tactile Augmented Reality

“…These characteristics can be very useful to enrich haptic experience in augmented reality (AR), laying the foundations of a new paradigm for humanmachine interaction, i.e., tactile augmented reality. We will report an implementation of such a paradigm in Section 6, where we describe the usage of a modified version of W-FYD to reproduce artery pulse in an AR simulator for laparoscopic cholecystectomy [29].…”